The most recent private forecasts that the Central Bank collects monthly indicate that Argentina will close the year with inflation of 99% accumulated, 2023 with 99.7% and they expect that it will only fall to 76% in 2024.
Consumer prices in Argentina experienced a year-on-year rise of 92.4% last November, standing 4.4 percentage points above the variation registered in October, as reported on Thursday by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (indec).
In the eleventh month of the year, consumer prices grew by 4.9% compared to last October, a slight reduction compared to the rate of 6.3% that had been registered the previous month.
Goods had a positive monthly variation of 4.5% last month, while services rose 5.8%, data that amount to 88.2% and 77.7%, respectively, in the interannual comparison.
Among the divisions that suffered the highest monthly increases in November, housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels (8.7%) stand out due to the increase in electricity and gas services as a result of the tariff segmentation promoted by the Government by Alberto Fernández last August.
Prices in Argentina
Within the framework of policies aimed at reducing the fiscal deficit to lower the burden of subsidies that the State pays through a registry of consumers who asked to maintain assistance on their utility bills.
The next category with the greatest advances was communication (6.4%), which was mainly influenced by the increase in telephone and Internet services, followed by alcoholic beverages and tobacco (6.3%) due to the impact it had the rise of cigarettes.
On the other hand, food prices had the lowest incidence throughout the country with an increase of 3.5% compared to the previous month (6.2%).
These results are the result of the freezing policy launched in November with manufacturers of basic consumer products and supermarkets to maintain fixed amounts of 1,700 items for 120 days.
The presidential spokesperson, Gabriela Cerruti, announced -before the inflation report is revealed- that the economic context in Argentina is “relatively calm.”
“We are entering a context of relative calm and we hope that there will be a continuous decline with respect to inflation. We are going to work, for now, with this hypothesis, ”he concluded.
An attempt to contain prices
This type of program to try to contain prices is not new, but replaces a similar one that, with some variations, has been renewed since the end of 2013 and whose effectiveness is constantly questioned.
The Argentine Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, had affirmed at the time of launching this program that the inflation problem was not solved by itself, but rather that it requires an orderly fiscal policy and an accumulation of monetary reserves.
Consumer prices had accumulated a rise of 50.9% last year, denoting an acceleration compared to the 36.1% verified in 2020.
Last October, the International Monetary Fund and Argentina corrected the inflation projection for the end of 2022, with a range that could vary between 90 and 100%, an advance of more than 30 percentage points compared to the estimates they had in June ( 52-62%).