AI Analysis: Machinery and equipment price index, by commodity, monthly

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Machinery and Equipment Price Index (Table 18100283) tracks 64 commodity categories monthly from January 1997 to January 2026, revealing a 46.3% overall price increase over nearly three decades, from an average index of 87.9 to 128.6 (base year 2016=100). Prices peaked at 130.8 in March 2025, with post-2020 data showing the most volatility, consistent with COVID-19 supply chain disruptions and the subsequent inflation surge. Despite wide variation across categories — ranging from 51.1 to 509.8 — the vast majority of commodity pairs move together strongly, with an average inter-category correlation of 0.836.

Key Findings

• The overall machinery and equipment price index rose 46.3% over nearly 30 years, climbing from an average of 87.9 in January 1997 to 128.6 in January 2026, with an all-time peak of 130.8 reached in March 2025.
• Domestic machinery and equipment prices (mean index: 103.67) have risen more since the 2016 baseline than imported machinery (97.63) or the total combined category (98.50).
• The price index spans an exceptionally wide range — from a low of 51.1 to a high of 509.8 — yet the middle 50% of all 43,017 observations fall within the relatively tight interquartile range of 85.2 to 108.0.
• An overwhelming 1,185 product pairs exhibit a correlation above 0.9, with the strongest being 'Industrial and commercial fans, blowers' and 'Materials handling machinery and equipment' at r = 0.999, indicating broad co-movement driven by shared macroeconomic forces.
• The weakest relationship in the dataset exists between 'Computers and computer peripherals' and 'Prefabricated wood and manufactured (mobile) homes' at r = -0.738, reflecting computers' long-run deflationary price trend against rising costs in other categories.
• Only 1.2% of observations (168 out of 14,339) were flagged as outliers using the IQR method, confirming overall dataset stability, though post-2020 data contains a disproportionate share of anomalies linked to pandemic-era supply chain disruptions.
• Small electric appliances recorded the highest average price index among all 64 commodity categories at 106.3, while computers and computer peripherals represent the most notable deflationary category over the full 1997–2026 period.