Sweden

We’ve added more data on the consumer price index’s components and weightings.

The heat map below breaks down yearly inflation rates by category. The “cold blue” and “hot red” color shading is based on the deviation from each category’s 12-month trend.

The “total” line shows how headline CPI decelerated from 12.3 percent in December 2022 to 5.8 percent last month. This has been a broad trend across European economies, with late 2023 in stark contrast to the 2022 spike caused by the Russia-Ukraine war’s effect on commodity prices.

Cost pressures from food, housing and utility bills have come off sharply. These categories have a cumulative weight of 36.8 percent in Swedish CPI.

An outlier here is alcohol and tobacco, a category with a small weighting in the CPI. Inflation has almost doubled, reaching 6 percent.

United Kingdom

We’ve added new weekly data on transactions at the Pret a Manger sandwich chain from the ONS.

These indices serve as a leading indicator for consumer spending levels and provide insight into work mobility patterns as the economy recovered from Covid-19.

The broader dataset contains 10 time series, each tracking a distinct geography. London is broken down between “Airport,” “City Worker,” “Stations,” “Suburban,” and “West End.” Five more series track Manchester, Scotland, Yorkshire, “Regional Stations” and “Regional Towns.” They are expressed as a proportion of the weekly average across the first four weeks of 2020.

In the chart below, we created a composite London index through an arithmetic mean of the five geographies. The 100 threshold indicates the point at which weekly transactions would be back to their Week 1 – Week 4 2020 average.

Broadly, transactions have surpassed pre-pandemic levels. However, this recovery has not been even. Airport transactions are much stronger than pre-Covid levels (126); the weakest recovery is in the City, where there are still fewer sandwich and coffee purchases than there were in 2020.