About this site
This site hosts a single research report: an investigation into why Iceland's headline CPI has stayed above target for nearly four years while peer economies have normalised. It argues — with data — that the persistent gap is not a monetary phenomenon, not weakly anchored expectations, and not wage-push from a tight labour market. It is a structural housing supply failure colliding with indexation, demographic demand, and the architecture of municipal land release.
What this is
A long-form, charts-and-citations research piece. The full report is at /en (English) and /is (Icelandic). Both versions are composed from the same underlying analysis; the Icelandic version uses the central bank's own register where it exists.
Methodology
Every claim is backed by either:
a number that comes from a public Icelandic data source (Hagstofan, Seðlabanki Íslands, Húsnæðis- og mannvirkjastofnun, Skatturinn, Ríkisendurskoðun, the National Audit Office, or municipal open-data portals)
a published document (Peningamál, Fjármálastöðugleiki, central bank working papers, IMF Article IV consultations, OECD economic surveys, Sjálfbærni- og efnahagsmál committee reports), or
a derived calculation from a registry (the HMS kaupskrá — every property transaction in Iceland — and the HMS húsnæðisáætlanir municipal housing plans, in particular)
There is no proprietary data and no off-the-record sourcing. Everything in the report can be replicated from the bundle linked below.
Data sources
| Source | What is used |
| Hagstofan CPI | Sub-component decomposition (imported, domestic, services, housing) |
| Hagstofan population | Citizenship breakdowns, quarterly flows |
| Hagstofan income | Wage index, sector wages, income deciles, background splits |
| Seðlabanki | Policy rate, new credit by indexation type, FX reserves |
| HMS kaupskrá | 222k property transactions — new-build size/price/location analysis |
| HMS indices | Kaupvísitala vs leiguvísitala (price vs rent divergence) |
| HMS húsnæðisáætlanir | Municipal housing plans, completions vs need, lóðaframboð, biðlistar |
| Reykjavík opnir reikningar | Division-level municipal spending |
| FSR / Peningamál | Central bank stability reports (manual extraction) |
The full glossary of Icelandic political-economy terminology used throughout
the report — including authoritative English equivalents drawn from CBI and
government publications — is included in the data bundle as glossary.md.
The .zip bundle
The full research environment — every CSV, every Python analysis script, every
section file, the glossary, and the project context document — is packaged as
a downloadable zip. You can rerun the analyses, modify the methodology, or
fork the report. The bundle does not include the upstream
icelandic-data data toolkit, but
all derived outputs the report depends on are present.
Who I am
Jökull Sólberg. Reykjavík-based. The research started as exploratory analysis on top of an Icelandic public-data toolkit I maintain, and grew large enough to warrant its own home. I am not a professional economist; I read the central bank's Peningamál and Fjármálastöðugleiki publications because the macro story they tell does not fit the micro story I see in the property registry. This site is the long version of the discrepancy.
If you are an economist or a journalist who wants to use this work, please do — every chart, every number, and every methodological choice is documented. If you find a mistake, open an issue.