In particular, the year-on-year rate of increase in the SRI-Hitotsubashi Unit Value Price Index – which factors in firms’ strategy to maintain sales prices by making frequent changes in their products – has been around 2 percent recently, representing somewhat more of an acceleration than that in the CPI for the same items covered by this index (Chart 13).
If the Bank conducts its monetary policy by focusing only on the CPI in official statistics, in a situation where people’s perception of inflation level exceeds its growth rate, there is a possibility that people would come to feel an excessive rise in prices, and that could cause many distortions in their sentiment and actual spending behavior (Chart 14).