SEOUL, Sept 2 (Reuters) – South Korea’s consumer inflation quickened in August on a one-off factor of low-base effects, \u200cgovernment data showed on Wednesday, still coming in \u200clower than expectations. <\/p>\n
The consumer price index (CPI) rose 3.1% in August from a year \u200bearlier, after rising 2.8% in July, according to the Ministry of Data and Statistics. That compared with a median forecast for a 3.2% increase in a Reuters poll of economists. <\/p>\n
Prices of \u200cpublic services rose \u20606.5%, driven by a one-off factor of 26.7% jump in mobile service fees due to temporary \u2060price discounts in August last year. Petroleum prices were up 14.2%, after rising 15.5% in July. <\/p>\n
Without the one-off effect of mobile \u200bservice fees, \u200binflation would have been weaker \u200bat 2.5%, the finance \u200cministry said after the data release, adding that nationwide fuel price caps lowered inflation by 0.3 percentage points last month. <\/p>\n
The ministry also said it was expecting inflation to ease this month. <\/p>\n
Last week, the Bank of Korea delivered a second straight \u200cincrease in interest rates as inflation \u200bhas been holding above target and \u200bfinancial stability risks persist. <\/p>\n
CPI \u200brose 0.2% on a monthly basis, after falling \u200c0.2% in the previous month. \u200bEconomists had expected \u200ba 0.3% rise. <\/p>\n
Core CPI, stripping out volatile food and energy prices, was up 3.4% in August from a \u200byear earlier, after \u200crising 2.6% in July. It was the fastest year-on-year \u200bincrease since May 2023. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jihoon Lee; Editing by \u200bChris Reese and Tom Hogue) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL, Sept 2 (Reuters) – South Korea’s consumer inflation quickened in August on a one-off factor of low-base…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24549,71187,9581,52712,31,13213,112],"class_list":["post-139831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-korea","tag-august","tag-august-last-year","tag-government","tag-july","tag-korea","tag-reuters","tag-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}