The government will soon add mobile phone fees, personal computers and "gyudon" beef bowls to items monitored when compiling monthly consumer price indexes as part of a reshuffle of the gauges' components, government officials said Wednesday. The new items will be used to calculate the CPIs starting from August, said officials at the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry, which releases the indexes monthly.
The replacement is aimed at bolstering the CPIs' credibility by increasing the number of items figuring in Japanese consumers' shopping behavior in recent years, the officials said.
The replacement will be timed to coincide with a change in the base year used as the standard for making year-on-year comparisons to 2000 from the current base year of 1995.