Revised 8 August 2026 · v3.0.0 · rebuilt on World Bank harmonised data as the spine; a claim about India’s 2019 inflation was wrong and is corrected in the text; Italy excluded from the producer panel as implausible

Five years, one number each

Year-on-year rates are how prices are reported and a poor way to feel their weight.

Compounding 2021 through 2025 answers the question people actually ask. The spread it produces is the single most striking thing in this data: excluding Argentina, the range runs from 3.5% to 35.7% — a tenfold difference across five years in economies that all faced the same commodity shock, the same freight disruption and the same energy prices.

Argentina is not on the same axis as anything else here. Its 1,811% is a currency and fiscal collapse, not an inflation cycle; at 80.4% a year the rule of 72 gives a doubling time of about eleven months. It is shown because leaving it out would misrepresent how wide the real distribution is, and it should be read separately from every other row.

China is the other end and the more interesting one. Consumer prices rose 3.5% in five years — 0.7% a year, a doubling time above a century on that pace. Set against Brazil’s 35.7%, that is a tenfold difference in what happened to a household’s money over the same window. Whatever the 2021–22 shock was, it was not something that happened to everyone.

The path, not just the destination

The same total can hide very different journeys.

Three shapes are worth separating.

The spike-and-return. The United States, Canada, Korea and Australia all ran near or below 2% in 2019–20, peaked hard in 2022 — 8.0%, 6.8%, 5.1%, 6.6% — and came back to roughly 2–3%. This is the cycle the 2022 headlines described, and it fits four rich economies well.

The long plateau. India, Mexico and South Africa peaked less sharply than the rich economies but stayed elevated far longer. India ran between 5% and 6.7% for four consecutive years, 2021 through 2024, where the United States was above 4% for three. The spike was smaller; the persistence was greater, and the cumulative total in Exhibit 1 — 27.4%, fourth-highest outside Argentina — is a product of duration rather than peak. India’s 2025 reading of 2.4% is the first genuinely low print of the period and it is very recent.

The economies that never joined in. China peaked at 2.0%. Saudi Arabia peaked at 3.4%, in 2020, before the shock. Japan’s highest reading of the whole period is 3.3% in 2023, and at 3.2% in 2025 it is the only advanced economy here still close to its own peak — its problem was the opposite one and the exit from deflation arrived late.

The euro area is not one number

Eurostat’s member-state breakdown, which the OECD aggregate in Exhibit 2 cannot show.

Exhibits 1 and 2 carry a single “Euro area” row, sourced to the OECD on a national-methodology, calendar-year-average convention. Eurostat publishes the same underlying story on its own HICP-based measure, at the EU-27 level rather than the narrower euro area, and — more usefully — broken out by member state and by spending category. The two aggregates are not identical (EU-27 includes non-euro members such as Poland and Sweden), so the figures below sit alongside Exhibit 2 rather than replacing it, but the internal spread they reveal is real and is not visible in a single euro-area line:

The EU-27’s 2025 average of 2.5% sits on top of a 6.0-point range between Romania (6.8%) and Cyprus (0.8%) — a spread within one currency-adjacent bloc almost as wide as this article’s entire G20 consumer-price range excluding Argentina (3.5% to 35.7%, Exhibit 1, though that is a five-year cumulative figure against a single-year one here and the two should not be compared directly). And the categories driving 2025’s EU inflation are not the energy and food lines that dominated 2022: insurance and financial services rose 5.3%, the fastest of any category Eurostat tracks, with education services close behind at 4.7%, while information and communication prices fell 1.7%, the only category to do so. The 2022 shock was a commodity story; the 2025 EU inflation that remains is, on this evidence, a services-and-fees story.

The producer side

Bigger swings, and one economy that ran its own cycle entirely.

Consumer prices are the end of a chain. The producer end moves further and earlier, and comparing it across borders is harder than it looks — India publishes a wholesale price index where most economies publish a producer price index, and the OECD discontinued its harmonised international series in 2022. The instrument problem, and what it means for reading Indian numbers specifically, is set out in the companion piece on India’s wholesale prices. The panel below is assembled one national statistical office at a time.

On the World Bank’s harmonised series, cumulative producer price inflation over the four years to 2024 runs 47.9% in Brazil, 34.7% in South Africa, 30.7% in India, 29.4% in Germany, 22.4% in the United States, 21.6% in Japan and 19.6% in Korea. China’s rose 4.9%.

Brazil ran a different cycle from everyone else. Its producer prices rose 11.1% in 2020, the year every other economy here was flat or falling, and peaked at +31.6% in 2021 — earlier and roughly double anyone else’s peak. That is not the commodity shock, which had not arrived. It is the real, which lost about a quarter of its value against the dollar during 2020. A producer index in a country with a falling currency and a heavy imported-input bill is partly measuring the exchange rate.

China is the mirror image. It is the only economy here with producer prices falling in two consecutive years, −3.0% and −2.2%, and its 2021 peak was among the mildest. Both ends of its price chain agree. Brazil’s deviation is a currency story; China’s is a demand story.

2026 is a fresh turn

And it is global.

The United States went from +2.4% in January to +12.3% in May, a ten-point acceleration in four months. Korea moved almost identically. Japan nearly tripled. The euro area crossed from −2.7% to +4.9% inside three months. India’s April print of +8.3% sits between Korea and the United States.

Brazil is the laggard this time, by the same logic that made it the leader last time: it entered 2026 at −4.4%, still working off the 2021 spike, and has only just crossed into positive territory.

Crude moving from roughly $77 to $92 across the period is the obvious candidate. Whatever it is, it is not confined to one country, and it has not yet reached consumer indices — which, on the evidence of 2021–22, is a matter of timing rather than of whether.

A correction to this article

Rebuilding on a harmonised source changed one of its claims.

The first version of this piece drew consumer inflation from an OECD G20 series and stated that India “had the highest consumer inflation in this table” in 2019, at 7.7%, falling to 2.8% by 2025 — a reversal it called real and underdiscussed.

That was wrong. On calendar-year averages India’s 2019 consumer inflation was 3.7%, not 7.7% — middling for this group, below Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. The OECD figure appears not to be a calendar-year average; the World Bank’s indicator, the World Bank’s separate inflation database and India’s own published series all land near 3.7%, and 7.7% is close to India’s December 2019 print, which was a food-price spike.

The correct reading is less dramatic and more interesting. India did not fall from the top; it stayed elevated longer than anyone else — between 5% and 6.7% for four consecutive years, 2021 through 2024, where the United States exceeded 4% for three. Its five-year cumulative total of 27.4% is fourth-highest outside Argentina, and it got there through persistence rather than through a peak. The 2.4% print for 2025 is real and is the first genuinely low reading of the period.

Every consumer figure in Exhibits 1 and 2 now comes from one World Bank indicator on one convention, which is what should have been done first.

How this was calculated, and how badly it can differ

The methodology check, run after the fact and reported honestly.

Two questions were put to the literature after these tables were built: whether the cumulative arithmetic is right, and whether the cross-country comparison is sound. The first came back clean. The second did not.

The arithmetic. Cumulative inflation is the ratio of index endpoints, not the sum of annual rates — five years at 6% is 33.8%, not 30% — and converting a total back to a per-year figure requires the geometric mean, the n-th root of the multiplier, never the arithmetic average of the rates. Both conventions are used above, and index endpoints were preferred wherever an index level existed rather than compounding rounded annual rates, which accumulates error. That part stands.

The comparison is the problem. The World Bank maintains a Global Database of Inflation (Ha, Kose and Ohnsorge) covering up to 209 countries from 1970, with headline, core, food, energy, producer price and deflator series, updated twice a year — built for exactly the cross-country exercise attempted here. Checking this article’s hand-assembled producer panel against it is sobering:

The other seventeen were not noise. Brazil differs by 24.6 points in 2019 because the two sources are not measuring the same thing at all — IBGE’s industrial IPP against a broader producer measure. The United States differs by 8.2 points in 2022 because “US PPI” can mean All Commodities, which is what Exhibit 4 uses and which swings hardest, or a final-demand measure, which does not. India’s 4.1-point gap in 2023 is mostly the April-anchoring used throughout this blog against a calendar-year average.

Compounded over four years the disagreement narrows for most — India 28.2% against 30.6%, Korea 19.2% against 19.6% — but the United States still lands at 30.9% against 22.4%. That is an eight-point difference in the answer to “how much did American producer prices rise”, from two sources both entitled to the label.

On the consumer side the comparability problem is different and better documented: national CPIs are not built to be compared. The United States imputes a rental equivalent for owner-occupied housing, giving shelter a weight above 30%; the euro area’s harmonised index excludes owner-occupied housing altogether and carries a rent weight of around 6%. Eurostat has been working towards including it for years and began a further methodological revision in 2026. The OECD series used in Exhibits 1 and 2 is explicitly the national methodology for each country, which is the right choice for “what happened to prices as this country measures them” and the wrong one for a strict like-for-like race.

Finally, the synchronisation this article describes qualitatively has been measured. Ha, Kose and Ohnsorge find a common global factor accounting for roughly 22% of the variation in national inflation rates since 2001, with synchronisation broad-based across both advanced and emerging economies. That is a useful calibration for the argument above: the shared cycle is real and it is roughly a fifth of the story, which is precisely why Brazil and China can run their own.

One month further on, from a survey

What a commercial indicator adds, and what it cannot.

Every figure above is an official national statistic and the most recent of them is June 2026. S&P Global’s Purchasing Managers’ Index runs a month ahead of that, and its July commentary is worth reading against these tables — with a clear understanding of what it is. The PMI is a survey. It asks executives whether prices rose or fell and converts the answers into a diffusion index; it reports direction and relative intensity, not a rate. The index values are subscription-only, so what follows is S&P Global’s published characterisation, attributed as such, not a number this blog can check against a source document. It is context for the official series, not a substitute for them.

On that basis, four things in the July commentary bear on this article.

It corroborates the finding that the United States turned hardest. S&P Global reports the US recording “the steepest rise in selling prices among advanced economies” in July, accelerating from June, with the rate among the sharpest in four years. That is an independent, differently-constructed measure reaching the same conclusion as Exhibit 5, which matters more than either would alone.

It flags a turn my data is too early to see. The producer acceleration in Exhibit 5 runs to June and I attributed it largely to crude. S&P Global reports energy price pressures easing sharply in July after reduced Middle East tensions, with goods price inflation falling to a four-month low and factory input cost growth to its weakest since February. If that holds in the official series, the 2026 producer spike will have been a two-quarter event rather than a new cycle — and the July and August official prints are the test.

It splits goods from services, which none of the indices above do. Goods price inflation is cooling while services charge inflation ticked higher, near a three-year high, concentrated in consumer-facing sectors. A producer price index is largely a goods instrument; a consumer price index is not. That divergence is a reason to expect the producer and consumer series in this article to move apart over the next few quarters rather than together.

And it puts India in the accelerating group. Among major emerging markets S&P Global reports Brazil still the steepest but cooling to a four-month low, mainland China the weakest, and faster rates of inflation in Russia and India. That is consistent with the direction in Exhibits 3 and 4, and inconsistent with reading India’s 2.4% consumer print for 2025 as the current state of affairs.

The verdict: how is a middle-class family actually doing?

Prices are half the answer. Nobody spends a price level; they spend a wage.

Every exhibit above prices the cost side. None of them prices the income side, and a household does not experience “prices rose 23.6% in five years” — it experiences whatever its wage did over the same five years, netted against that number. The honest verdict this article can give therefore splits cleanly into a group it has real evidence for and a group it does not.

The verdict for the rich, “spike-and-return” economies in this article — the United States, Canada, Korea, Australia, and by extension the euro-area countries — needs a correction to how this piece has framed them so far. “Returned to roughly 2–3%” described the inflation rate. It did not describe the family’s purchasing power, which is a stock, not a flow: prices that spiked in 2022 and then merely stopped rising fast have still not given back what they took, unless wages rose faster than prices for long enough afterward to close the gap. The OECD’s own data says that gap is still open in half of its 37 members as of Q3 2025 — nearly four years after the Q1 2021 pre-shock baseline. Of the economies in this article’s own Exhibit 1 table, Australia and Italy are both explicitly named as more than 2% below their Q1 2021 real wage, and Australia’s recovery from its trough is the OECD’s second-weakest at only 16%. For the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada and Korea, this source states the aggregate finding but not each country’s individual position relative to the Q1 2021 line in text form — so this article names what it can verify and flags the rest as an open question rather than guessing from a chart.

For India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, this article cannot pass the same verdict — and says so rather than improvising one. None are OECD members, so the wage bulletin above does not cover them, and no comparable harmonised real-wage series was located in this research pass. What can be said, honestly, from the price side alone: China’s essentially flat five-year price level (3.5% total) is unambiguously easier on a fixed or slow-growing income than Brazil’s 35.7%, whatever wages did in either country, because the arithmetic of purchasing-power erosion runs through the price side regardless. India’s middle-class family lived through four consecutive years (2021–24) of inflation between 5% and 6.7% — the “long plateau” described earlier — which is a longer sustained squeeze than any single-year spike, and whether Indian wages kept pace over that plateau is not established by anything in this article and would need a dedicated piece using India’s own wage-rate or earnings data.

Sources. Methodology and cross-check — Jongrim Ha, M. Ayhan Kose and Franziska Ohnsorge, One-Stop Source: A Global Database of Inflation, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9737 (2021), and the associated Global Database of Inflation, producer price inflation series, downloaded 8 August 2026; European Central Bank, Owner-occupied housing and inflation measurement, Statistics Paper Series 47. Survey context — S&P Global Market Intelligence, “Global PMI shows inflation rates remaining elevated amid rising demand for services”, economics commentary by Chris Williamson, 7 August 2026; characterisations only, as the underlying PMI series is available by subscription. Instrument comparison — Central Statistics Office (Ireland), Wholesale Price Index monthly release; Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), Prices theme pages. Consumer prices — OECD, G20 consumer price indices, all items, national methodology, annual growth rate, retrieved from the OECD SDMX API on 8 August 2026. India producer side — Office of the Economic Adviser, DPIIT, wholesale price index base 2011-12, via the MoSPI statistical API. United States — US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index by Commodity: All Commodities, via FRED series PPIACO. Japan — Bank of Japan, Corporate Goods Price Index, Producer Price Index all commodities. Korea — Bank of Korea ECOS, Producer Price Index total index, series 404Y014, 2020=100. China — National Bureau of Statistics, annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development, “producer prices for industrial products”, retrieved from Internet Archive captures because the NBS site does not respond to requests from this network. Brazil — IBGE, Índice de Preços ao Produtor, general industry, aggregate 6903. Euro area — Eurostat, Industrial producer prices, domestic market, NACE B-E36, EA20, series sts_inpp_a. EU-27 member-state spread and category breakdown — Eurostat, Consumer prices – inflation, Statistics Explained, retrieved 8 August 2026. US live CPI cross-check — US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index News Release, June 2026 results. Real-wage verdict — OECD, The real wage recovery is slowing down — The OECD wage bulletin, March 2026. Cumulative figures are the author’s calculation compounding the annual rates shown, or taken from index endpoints where an index level was available. No figure on this page comes from a commercial data vendor.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.