AI Analysis: Industrial product price index, by product, monthly

Executive Summary

Canada's Industrial Product Price Index (Statistics Canada, Table 18100266) spans nearly 70 years of monthly data across 394 product categories, revealing a dramatic 965% surge in the Total IPPI from 13.3 in January 1956 to an all-time high of 141.7 in March 2026. Price movements across industrial categories are remarkably synchronized, with an average inter-category correlation of 0.806 and 1,923 pairs exceeding r = 0.9, pointing to a shared inflation trend driving the entire industrial economy. While the vast majority of price changes are gradual and correlated, 333 post-2000 outliers highlight pockets of extreme volatility concentrated in commodity and energy-related sectors.

Key Findings

• The Total IPPI rose 965% over 70 years — from 13.3 in January 1956 to an all-time high of 141.7 in March 2026 (base year 2020=100), with the most recent reading marking the dataset's peak.
• The dataset contains 123,412 records across 394 unique NAPCS product classifications, with index values ranging from a low of 3.4 to a high of 564.9, reflecting enormous price variation across products and time.
• The distribution of index values is slightly left-skewed (mean 86.02, median 92.00), with 50% of all values falling between 67.2 and 102.3 and a standard deviation of 36.13.
• Industrial product price categories are highly correlated with one another — the average absolute correlation is 0.806, and 1,923 category pairs share a correlation of 0.9 or higher, indicating broad economy-wide price co-movement.
• No category pairs showed strong negative correlations (none at or below -0.5), confirming that no industrial product segment consistently moves against the broader pricing trend.
• Only 333 outliers (0.4% of post-2000 data points) were detected using a 3-standard-deviation threshold, but these extreme deviations are concentrated in energy and commodity categories most exposed to market shocks.
• The strongest single correlation (r = 1.000) exists between 'Coffee and tea [19111]' and 'Coffee and tea [191]', reflecting a hierarchical parent-child relationship within the NAPCS classification structure.