Keeping Track of Vehicle Prices

Automobiles are a major item for the economy, both because of the weight the industry has on total manufacturing output/employment, and because of their relevance for consumer spending. But data on vehicle prices is not easy to find, and INDEC does not publish a monthly estimate for national vehicle prices.

Utilizing both the INDEC Wholesale Price Index (IPIM) and the City of Buenos Aires Consumer Price Index (CBA-CPI), it is possible to keep track of vehicle prices with an Alphacast pipeline. The procedure is simple: after fetching both datasets and merging them, you can take a simple average of their monthly variations (IPIM Vehicle Prices and CBA-CPI Vehicle Purchases), and derive a base Dec-16=100 index that follows both. The final data is available here. Using transformations, you can add other datapoints to the story, such as real vehicle prices, and MoM or YoY changes.

It is possible to then see a variety of phenomena. For instance, real vehicle prices decreased strongly between mid-2016 and mid-2018, but increased rapidly after each large devaluation. However, absent large devaluations, prices accelerated without any exchange rate devaluations - in fact, prices grew as much between 2016 and June 2020 as since June 2020. Regardless, starting in May 2018 vehicle prices grew above the general price level, although briefly converged in late 2020.

Find the Vehicle Prices dataset here

Related Datasets

Prices - Argentina - Vehicle Price Index - Monthly

Inflation - Argentina - INDEC - Wholesale Prices - Monthly

Prices - Argentina - GCBA - Buenos Aires Consumer Price Index - By categories