Wholesale prices in March dropped 2.2 percent from a year earlier for the sharpest fall in nearly seven years due to falling demand amid the weakening of the economy, the Bank of Japan said Monday, fueling deflation fears.
The prices, gauged by the BOJ's corporate goods price index, stood at 104.3 against the 2005 base of 100, the central bank said in a preliminary report.
The headline reading fell for the third consecutive month and marked the largest drop since May 2002. The decline was also greater than the average market forecast of a 1.7 percent fall in a Kyodo News poll of economic think tanks.