IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ltv/wpaper/202403.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Consumer price rigidity in the Baltic states during periods of low and high inflation

Author

Listed:
  • Ludmila Fadejeva

    (Latvijas Banka)

  • Valentin Jouvanceau

    (Lietuvos Bankas)

  • Alari Paulus

    (Eesti Pank)

Abstract

The Baltic states experienced the most substantial consumer price inflation of any of the EU countries shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic. The year-on-year all-items inflation rate averaged 11% from January 2021 to September 2023, peaking at around 22% in late 2022. This study examines how consumer price rigidity in the region during this period of high inflation differed from the preceding period of low inflation in 2019-2020. We use the detailed price records that underlie the official consumer price indexes to assess the frequency and the size margins of price changes. The average frequency of price changes increased by about four percentage points when inflation was high, as an increase of five percentage points in the frequency of price increases combined with a fall of one percentage point in the frequency of price cuts. The average size of price changes increased by 2.8 percentage points, mainly because the share of price increases changed. We further show that structural shocks in energy prices and aggregate demand contributed significantly to fluctuations in the inflation rate through the frequency of price changes during the period of high inflation. All this points to pricing being state-dependent in the Baltic states.

Suggested Citation

  • Ludmila Fadejeva & Valentin Jouvanceau & Alari Paulus, 2024. "Consumer price rigidity in the Baltic states during periods of low and high inflation," Working Papers 2024/03, Latvijas Banka.
    • Handle: RePEc:ltv:wpaper:202403
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://datnes.latvijasbanka.lv/papers/WP_3-2024.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    consumer price rigidity; price-setting; high inflation; frequency of price changes;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - General
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ltv:wpaper:202403. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Konstantins Benkovskis (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bolgvlv.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.