What if we use some unusual approach to figure out inflation

Looking at historical data of oil commodity prices and gasoline prices got simple idea: could it be used to measure inflation? Of course there are multiple factors those impact ratio between those including EV becoming more popular but we’ll try to compare numbers. Since both of those price indicators have periods of high volatility we decide to take annual average price into account. Using finder as a data source following is the analysis.

YearAgerage Gas PriceAverage Crude Price% change gas% change CrudeGas vs Oil changeYearly average inflation rate
20172.5650.80002.13
20182.7365.236.6428.414.282.44
20192.6456.99-3.3-12.633.831.81
20202.1939.68-17.05-30.371.781.25
20213.0368.1738.3671.81.874.69
20223.9894.5331.3538.671.238.02
20233.5477.64-11.06-17.871.624.13
20243.2778.33-7.630.89-0.123.15
from 201727.7354.191.95approx 28

From data above it looks like there is no correlation of oil vs gas price growth with actual inflation metrics. It is interesting that for the period of time we selected gasoline price increase match inflation indicator very closely, but that probably coincidence and not valid assumption for many other periods. We will definitely spend time researching this topic more and share our findings in the future posts