ScholarWorks@경상국립대학교

초록

Recent concerns over the divergence between official inflation indices and consumers' perceived inflation highlight the need to better capture their lived economic experiences. Particularly for food, which are both frequently purchased and essential to human beings daily lives, the gap between its perceived and official inflation can undermine public trust for the government’s price stabilization and distort inflation expectations. This study develops a shopping basket-based perceived inflation index by leveraging cross-sectional survey data from 2021 to 2023 and examines how the perceived inflation influences dietary satisfaction across different demographic groups. A combination of probability, balance statistics, and median approaches was employed to robustly estimate perceived inflation levels, while generalized least squares (GLS) regression was applied to analyze factors affecting dietary satisfaction. The findings indicate that consumers consistently perceived food inflation to be higher than the official figures, with this gap widening during periods of high inflation. Furthermore, the perceived inflation gap was significantly associated with lower dietary satisfaction, particularly among elderly and low-income households. These results suggest that inflation perceptions are not merely reflections of economic indicators but also meaningful determinants of subjective well-being. The study underscores the importance of incorporating consumer-perceived inflation into policy design, particularly in food security and welfare programs.

키워드