This project aims at studying and analyzing the inflation rates of countries and major economic unions globally. The dataset is a public dataset downloaded from International Monetary Fund(IMF) which consists of the inflation rates of countries from 1980 to 2017 and the projected inflation rates of the countries till 2022.
After basic descriptive and exploratory data analysis, I have made a Shiny Dashboard in R to visualize the inflation rates of countries, economic trade unions as well as world. Link to the deployed app is added below.
Link to the app--https://anishwalia20.shinyapps.io/AnalysisofInflationRates/
The folder Inflation-Rates contains the dashboard's code and its implementation in R. For visualizing I have used 'highcharter' package which is an amazing package to make beautiful and amazing plots in R for web apps and dashboards.The syntax for 'highcharter' is similar to 'ggplot2' syntax.
More details about the package can be found at this link- http://jkunst.com/highcharter/ .
Inflation rates are the general rate at which price of the goods and services within a particular economy are rising and the purchasing power of the currency is declining due to the highly priced goods. High inflation is definately not good for an economy because it will always reduce the value for money. In general central banks of an ecomony tries to and work towards reducing the inflation rate and avoiding deflation. Very high inflation rates will devalue the country's currency and will result in further depreciation of currency's exchange value.
Say for example India's current inflation rate is 10%, this means that the INR(indian rupees) has depreciated by 10% against any other foreign currency. This greatly affects the payments received by the exporting bodies, import prices of goods etc. Imported goods usually gets costlier and exported goods will get cheaper when the nations's currency is weaker and is depreciating against any other nation's whose currency is stronger and appreciating.
Deflation is opposite of inflation. Deflation occurs when the inflation rates become negetive or are below 0. Deflation is more harmful and dangerous for an economy because it means that the prices of goods and services are going to decrease. Now this sounds amazing for consumers like us. But what actually happens is that the demand of goods and services have declined over a long term of time which has lead to over-production og goods and services. Deflation is more evil then inflation. Deflation causes unemployment, loss of jobs, decline in money wages, decreasing exxpenditure and decreasing demands of goods. This results in losses for business owners and Producers in the economy. It causes decrease in National Income, employment, and output. This directly indicates that a recession is on its way. This brings job losses , declining wages and a big hit to the stock portfolio. Deflation slows economy's growth and causes stagnation of economic acivities. It is a time of depression for all businesses and producers. As prices fall , people defer(postpone) purchases in hope of a better lower price deal. Due to this companies and firms have to cut down the cost of their goods and products which directly affects the wages of the employees which have to be lowered.