After a month of war you are fighting it The prices of various raw materials are risingThe first official effects have begun to be revealed. In March, Spain’s inflation rate, compared to the same month last year, approached 10%, the highest value in nearly 37 years, and in the words of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, a “bad sign”.
Data was revealed on Wednesday by Spain’s National Statistics Institute, indicating that the consumer price index rose 3% in March of this year, compared to the previous month. With respect to March of last year, the inflation rate was 9.8%, which is the largest rise since May 1985. It is also the fifteenth consecutive month that prices have risen in Spain.
The explanation for this rise is the effects of the war in Ukraine on the prices of various products. And this is exactly what the data released on Wednesday morning shows, which indicates a general price hike in most of the components analyzed, especially electricity, energy products, food and non-alcoholic beverages, at a time when oil and grain prices in international markets are on the rise.
This morning, after a relief in the last session, oil is rising again and the barrel of Brent crude, which serves as a reference for the European market, is again trading above $110, and remains, however, well below $110. He reached $139 at the beginning of this month. Both wheat and corn are trading at a lower level, but in both cases, the prices of these raw materials remain close to their historical high levels.
In response to the data now released, the Spanish Prime Minister acknowledged that the scenario is negative, but emphasized that the measures announced on Tuesday would be enough to mitigate the impact of the price hike. “It is a bad indicator, explained by 73% of the increase in energy prices and unprocessed food, and all this was exacerbated by the war in Ukraine,” Pedro Sanchez was quoted as saying by the Spanish press.
Still, he says, Measures recently approved by the Spanish Cabinet It will allow ‘curve fit’ [da inflação] At stake is a support package totaling 6 billion euros to mitigate the impact of rising inflation, which includes the imposition of a 2% limit on rent increases through June and the restoration of exceptional support to maintain employment, plus 20 cents per liter. Discount on fuel prices.
Even with these measures, concerns about the inflation spiral are getting worse in Spain. Also on Tuesday, the governor of the Bank of Spain, Pablo Hernández de Cos, warned that the inflation index now released would be “especially negative” and called on employers and workers to reach agreements to keep wages stable, thus avoiding even the sharpest rise in prices. Driven by the increase in corporate costs with wage modernization.
Meanwhile, inflation in Spain has been higher than the European average for several months. The latest data from Eurostat, referring to February, put Spain’s inflation rate at 7.5% that month, nearly two percentage points above the 5.8% rate recorded in the eurozone as a whole.
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