Right now inflation in the USA is about 0%. The BLS site says that for February 2010 the CPI (Consumer Price Index) which is our measure for inflation was "unchanged". I was curious how inflation was looking in other nations around the world so I chose to find the inflation rates for the G20 nations.
The G20 nations represents 80-85% of the world economy so looking at those 20 countries gives a quick picture of most of the world.
I got inflation figures off of the site IndexMundi. They have nations ranked by inflation levels. The inflation figures are rounded to whole percent numbers and are at least a month dated based on the source. So this isn't meant to be a perfect, up to the minute measure of inflation but a general picture of inflationary trend this year versus last year for most of the worlds economy.
Here is the table showing the inflation rate for 2010 and 2009:
2010 | 2009 | |
South Africa | 7% | 11% |
Argentina* | 6% | 8% |
Brazil | 4% | 6% |
Mexico | 5% | 5% |
Canada | 0% | 2% |
United States | -1% | 4% |
China | -1% | 6% |
Japan | -1% | 1% |
South Korea | 3% | 5% |
India | 11% | 8% |
Indonesia | 5% | 10% |
Saudi Arabia | 5% | 10% |
France | 0% | 3% |
Germany | 0% | 3% |
Italy | 1% | 3% |
Russia | 12% | 14% |
Turkey | 7% | 10% |
United Kingdom | 2% | 4% |
Australia | 2% | 4% |
* Argentina's inflation rate is considered to "lack credibility". An unofficial estimate of inflation rate is at 22%
As you can see a few countries have negative inflation or in other words they are seeing deflation.
Almost every nation on the list has lower inflation in 2010 than 2009. Only India has seen inflation increase. Average inflation rate is 3.5% in 2010 and it was 6.2% in 2009. Median rate is 3.0% in 2010 versus a 5.0% median in 2009.