SYDNEY: Australia’s headline inflation accelerated in the first three months of the year to climb back within the central bank’s 2%-3% target, reflecting how wildfire damage and the coronavirus shutdown impacted food prices before the pandemic sent the economy into a tailspin.
The consumer price index (CPI) rose 2.2% from a year earlier, the fastest pace since the third quarter of 2014 and above the 1.9% median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed Wednesday. The trimmed-mean gauge, a key measure of core inflation, gained an annual 1.8%, exceeding forecasts of a 1.6% rise.