East Asia Econ

East Asia Today

A few secondary data points in Japan: Tokyo CPI, retail sales and IP. Also, with both Korea and Taiwan releasing January data, a couple of charts on tourism. Finally, just to let you know that I am travelling the next couple of weeks. The daily will still appear, but there might be some disruption.

Paul Cavey

Feb 27, 2026 • 2 min read

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Japan – lower headline CPI, stronger retail sales

My framework for this year is an easing of tariff and price shocks that give a boost to domestic activity. Today's February data for Tokyo show the fall in headline inflation in January is persisting. Retail sales in January did jump, but these data can be noisy. IP is trending up, but slowly.

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East Asia Today

The big policy event today was the BOM meeting. The big data release was Taiwan's Q4 BOP data, showing a huge current account surplus. Also worth noting today are trade data for Japan for the first 10 days of February. And we also have a new video, discussing the cyclical outlook for China.

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Taiwan – huge CA to rise yet further

The surge in the current account surplus of January-September continued into the end of 2025. In Q4, the surplus reached almost 30% of GDP. The government's GDP forecast implies that will be roughly the size of the full-year surplus in 2026. Taiwan needs huge capital outflows to keep the TWD stable.