The National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) is ready to present, this Tuesday, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for February, and Previous expectations and estimates are generating great interest. According to private data, the CPI is expected to be below 20.6% recorded in January, but above 15%, which is the maximum number expected by the Government, based on the expectation that it is “closer to 10% than 20%.”
Inflationary pressure on prices continues, although according to the Executive and the consulting firms during the past month there was a lower rate of increaseswhich would reflect a slowdown compared to the strong rise in the CPI in January.
The Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, predicted that «this month inflation is going to be closer to 10% than 20%“, ensuring that “we are going to see a substantial decrease that is a product of the fiscal and monetary control that we are carrying out.”
At the end of last week, the official inflation indicator in the City of Buenos Aires was published, which serves as a preview of the national data, which marked a price increase of 14.1% during February and accumulated an increase of 264.5% in the last 12 months. This monthly variation is a sample of what the national government expects.
In this way, the Buenos Aires CPI reflected a drop of more than seven percentage points compared to the January record (when it had reached 21.7%). In the first two months of 2024, inflation in the City reached 38.9%.
The Market Expectations Survey (REM), prepared by the Central Bank (BCRA) with the projections of the main market players and consultants, estimated that February price index reached 15.8%while for the accumulated annual figure they foresee an increase of 210.2% at the end of this year.
The inflation of workers, prepared by the Metropolitan University for Education and Work (UMET) and the Center for Concertation and Development (CCD), was along the same lines. forecasting 15.8% in February, reflecting a slowdown of 6.8% compared to January. In the first two months of the year, the price variation reached an increase of 41.8% and has accumulated an increase of 282.3% in the last 12 months.
The Retail Price Survey of the consulting firm Eco Go, for its part, estimated inflation for the second month of the year one tenth above previous forecasts, placing it in the 15.9% monthly.
The C&T consulting firm, meanwhile, measured a CPI of 16.3% in February, falling compared to the 19.6% that the own survey showed in January. Despite the slowdown, the year-on-year variation rose to 275%, the highest since March 1991.
From the firm they analyzed that “the strong adjustments in various regulated prices explained much of the behavior of the month. The rise in public transportation caused the transportation sector to increase 47% monthly. The adjustment in electricity that was implemented in the middle of the month It was combined with a significant increase in the salary of building managers to generate a monthly variation of 38% in the housing category. In both cases, these are movements well above average.
In the measurements of the Libertad y Progreso Foundation, the February Price Index reached 16.8%, slowing down 3.8 percentage points compared to the official measurement in January (20.6%). According to these calculations, in the first two months of the year, the CPI accumulates a rise of 40.9% and the interannual variation reaches 288%, the highest value since March 1991.
From the entity they explained that the evolution of the month had an impact during the first week a substantially high variation, due to the update of rates in AMBA public transportation and they contributed that “from the second week of the month, the data converged to variations in the range of 2%-3% weekly, maintaining the trend of the last fortnight of January and reaching values similar to those of September 2023” .
With an evident consensus for a slower pace in price increases, but With differences in the degree of this decrease, expectations grow for the official measurement of the CPI in February, that the INDEC will announce this Tuesday, March 12.
With information from Argentine News.