Our spending habits are in constant flux. Goods and services that felt unfamiliar only a few years ago have become routine expenses, while items once bought regularly have quietly disappeared from the shopping basket. Checking one's health and schedule on a smartwatch, or paying a monthly software subscription, is now simply part of daily life. What we buy and where we spend keeps changing.
The consumer price index is the statistic that captures this spending life in numbers. It is often thought of as a simple gauge of how much prices have risen or fallen, but within it lies a full record of what people consume and where they spend more of their money. As consumption changes, the index that measures it must change as well. The rebasing of the consumer price index to 2025 is the process of writing our altered spending patterns into the statistics anew. The pace of change has accelerated recently with digital transformation and the arrival of new services. That is why the items, weights and compilation methods must be reviewed periodically, so that no gap opens up between people's lives and the statistics.
The first step is to re-examine the contents and the weight of the changed shopping basket. Items where spending has grown or that have established themselves as new areas of consumption — smartwatches, electric vehicle charging fees, cloud storage fees, software subscription fees and malatang — are being added, while peanuts, bellflower root and bracken, which have become less representative as consumption declined, are under review for removal. Existing items will also be merged or broken down further to reflect changes in spending behavior. The aim is to capture shifts in the automobile market, such as electric and hybrid vehicles, in finer detail and to fully reflect newly established digital services.
Weights by item will also be adjusted to match the recent structure of consumption spending. A weight represents the relative importance of each item within total spending. The weight for dining out, whose share has grown, will be raised, while durable goods and agricultural, livestock and fisheries products, whose shares have fallen relatively, will be lowered. These changes matter because they keep the price index from drifting away from actual spending life. By capturing newly emerging consumption without omission and reflecting shrinking consumption proportionately less, the index can show the public's changed spending structure closer to reality.
Capturing price changes accurately matters as much as reflecting changed consumption. For housing costs in particular, which account for a large share of household life, we are working to improve the existing field survey method by drawing on administrative records from housing lease reports. Using the broad data accumulated through actual lease transactions should reduce the survey burden while faithfully capturing price movements in the rental market.
The classification framework through which today's consumption is viewed is also being renewed. The system will be restructured to reflect the revised international standard, the Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP), placing newly emerged areas of consumption and items whose character has changed where they properly belong.
The rebasing of the consumer price index is therefore not merely a matter of adding and dropping a few items or changing the numbers for the base year. It is a process of redesigning what to survey, how heavily to weight it, what data to measure it with and how to present it, all in line with today's spending life. Through this, the price index is reborn as a statistic rooted in daily life, one that shows the currents of changing consumption in finer detail.
The numbers in statistics ultimately begin in our everyday lives. When today's consumption changes, the price index that holds it must change too. Capturing a changing daily life in good time and recording it properly is the role of price statistics. I hope the 2025 rebasing of the consumer price index becomes an occasion to reflect changed spending life more faithfully and to show the inflation the public actually feels with accuracy.