THE CHANGEOVER to the euro had only minimal impact on inflation in Slovakia. According to calculations of the Finance Ministry’s Financial Policy Institute (IFP), the changeover added to inflation only by 0.18 percentage points, which conforms to previous analyses by Slovakia’s central bank.
The National Bank of Slovakia (NBS) calculated the impact of the euro changeover on inflation as being between 0.12 and 0.19 percent, the SITA newswire reported.
The IFP said there were several attenuating factors during the period of Slovakia’s entry to the eurozone which eased the impact of the changeover to a great extent.
“These impacts cannot be unambiguously defined, but their existence is proven mainly by the fact that the changes of prices have been monitored in a completely non-standard time full of uncertainty in the economic environment,” SITA quoted the IFP study as saying. “It is not possible to clearly say which part of price changes clearly represented the effect of rounding up or which part of price changes was caused by the economic crisis.”
