Central bank sees Russia’s inflation close to 4% by 2019

MOSCOW, Dec 25 (PRIME) -- Russia’s inflation will start growing and creep close to 4% by the end of 2018 as impact of temporary factors, including an excessive food supply, exhausts, the central bank said in a research note on Monday.

“As soon as the impact from temporary factors, including excessive food supply, exhausts, annual inflation will start to grow and will get close to 4% by the end of 2018…Dynamics of food inflation may be affected by decrease of national reserves of potatoes and open-ground vegetables at the beginning of 2018,” the research note read.

Low inflation is present in November. “In November, annual inflation slowed down again to 2.5% from 2.7% in October, mainly due to temporary reasons. An average annual sliding inflation, which is less sensitive to one-time factors, decreased to 3.9%. This shows that inflation started to consolidate at a consistently low level,” the regulator said in the research note.

Monthly growth of consumer prices excluding seasonality slowed down in November due to contraction of prices for food. Annual terms of the increase of non-food goods also slowed down, but to a lesser degree than in the previous months, while a higher price of services sped up due on the growth of railway transportation tariffs, the authority said.

But annual growth dynamics of food prices was at the lowest for the whole period of observations as bumper crop coupled with a significant amount of accumulated reserves, the central bank added.

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