RETAIL PRICES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 134, 8 June 1926, Page 8

RETAIL PRICES.

CHEAPER SUGAR AND POTATOES

The "Abstract of Statistics" for May states that the retail price-index (Dominon weighted average) for the three food groups (groceries, dairy produce, and meat) as at April 15 was 1018 (on the base; average prices for the four chief centres during the years 1909-18 equals 1000), involving a fall of 5 points as compared with the corresponding index for the previous month, and showing a price-level 51.2 per cent above that of July, 1914 (viz, 1070).

In the groceries group a fall of 14 points since last month had been occasioned mainly by a drop in the price of potatoes. A rise of 60 points in the dairy produce group was 'attributed mainly to increases in the price of eggs and milk. The fall in meat which commenced last November continues, a drop of 5.4 points being recorded in April.

Lower prices prevailing this year for sugar account for a fall of 33 points in the groceries group this April as compared with last April. All items of dairy produce have risen since April last year, causing an increase of 74 points in this group. In the case of the meat group a similar general increase of 31 points is recorded, prices, of beef and pork showing definite increase all round, and prices of mutton showing a slight increase in most towns.*

■ Commenting upon the retail prices of all items of domestic expenditure the Government Statistician states that it now takes 32/4 on the average to purchase what 20/ would purchase- in the month preceding the outbreak of the Great War.

"A comparison has also been made," states the Government Statistician, "between the prices of a selected sample of twenty-two items of food in the United States and in New Zealand. Using the weights used in the compilation of the New Zealand index number of food prices, the prices of these wore found to have. been in February, 102(5, 41 per cent higher in the United States than in New Zealand. it was ascertained that substitution of the weights used by the United States j Bureau of Labour in the compilation of I its index number for the New Zealand I weights made no material difference in j the result. Admittedly the sample is small; but, including as'it does the most important items in the 'regimen , (or list of commodities included in the index number) of both countries, the assumption that food prices in general were in ! February, 1926, approximately 40 per cent higher in the United States than in New Zealand is justified.