Analysts foresee an extremely rapid price reduction this year, especially in all three Baltic countries, which in the previous months had the highest inflation rate, even up to 25%. Concretely, in Lithuania, the annual rate of inflation should be reduced from 21.5%, as it was last month, to only 1.4% in January of next year. Similar trends are predicted in Estonia and Latvia.
All four Visegrad countries also have higher inflation and lower economic growth forecasts than Slovenia, and the infamous record holder among them, as well as within the EU, has been Hungary in recent months. It is now struggling with more than 25% annual price growth, which is expected to drop to a still high eight percent by the end of the year.
would achieve modest economic growth this year. On the other hand, domestic demand is now lower than in the first half of last year due to high inflation, restrictive measures by the monetary authorities and reduced fiscal support. This was determined by the Consensus Economics group, which unites more than 200 professional and financial institutions.
The figures for Slovenia include the February projections of the European Commission and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the average economic growth forecast for this year is 1.2% and for next year 2.4%, which is on the level of the previous ones, in January predictions. More interesting are the new forecasts regarding the growth of prices in our country, which predict a slightly faster decrease in inflation. This is expected to decrease year-on-year in December this year from the current approximately ten to four percent – which is 0.4 percentage points less than analysts had predicted on average last month – and by April next year, it should even decrease to 3.2%.
Source: Miha Jenko, Delo. The complete article in the Slovene language is available HERE.