Dearer oil raised inflation rates throughout the developed world in January, when British consumer price growth of 3.5 percent far outstripped rises in the United States and other rich countries, the OECD said on Tuesday.
A 10.6 percent rise in energy prices lifted the year-on-year rate of inflation to 2.1 percent from 1.9 percent in December in the 31 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as a whole, the OECD said in a statement.
The annual inflation rate rose slightly to 1.0 percent from 0.9 percent in the euro zone, where Germany's rate dipped to 0.8 percent from 0.9 but France's rose to 1.1 percent from 0.9 and Italy's to 1.3 percent from 1.0 in December. Britain's notable increase partly reflected the return to a higher 17.5 percent rate of value-added sales tax after an earlier recession-fighting cut to 15 percent, said the OECD, whose members are mostly industrialised economies.
Food price dipped across most of the OECD, giving an average 0.7 percent year-on-year fall for the group.
Bar Iceland's 22.7 percent energy price rises year-on-year in January, the energy price jump was strongest in the United States at 19.1 percent, compared to almost half that rate for the OECD on aggregate and 4.0 percent in the 16-member euro currency zone.
The overall annual inflation rate fell marginally in the United States to 2.6 percent in January from a year-on-year rate of 2.7 percent the previous month.
The Paris-based OECD said Japan, which unlike the other rich countries has long had to contend with deflation, recorded an annual consumer price contraction of 1.3 percent in January, versus 1.7 percent in December.
Stripping out food and energy prices, the rate of growth in other consumer prices was unchanged at 1.6 percent year-on-year for the OECD group as the whole, it said.
The average inflation rate in the OECD area as a whole fell to 0.5 percent in 2009 from 3.7 percent in 2008.
It dropped to 0.3 percent from 3.3 in the euro zone and to 1.0 from 3.7 percent in the 27-country European Union, where it fell to 2.2 percent from 3.6 in Britain, the OECD statement said. It shifted to -0.4 from 3.8 percent in the United States, to -1.4 from 1.4 percent in Japan and to 0.3 from 2.4 percent in Canada.
