Inflation is growing, show the latest data from the National Statistics. Inflation in August compared to July is low - 0.1 percent. However, the annual rate has increased to 5.3 percent.
There has been a greater increase in communications, various goods and services such as insurance and administrative fees. We have also paid more for restaurants and hotels, alcohol and tobacco products, healthcare, food, education, home furnishings, entertainment and culture.
We have paid less for clothing and footwear and for transportation.
„0.1% is not an increase. In fact, August was one of the calm months of inflation. If you remember, I joked some time ago that if the government activity and the several agencies that were charged with the duty to protect citizens from inflation decreased, inflation would decrease quite significantly. And it happened“. This was commented on “This Morning“ by Lyubomir Datsov, a member of the Fiscal Council and former Deputy Minister of Finance.
“This was naturally now, because August is naturally a month with low inflation. The distribution by sectors itself is almost even, the deviations are very low“, he added.
“Annual inflation remains higher. There is no anti-inflation policy in Bulgaria. There are no signals in the opposite direction. When it is a year with some uncertainty, with a transition from one state to another, such as is related to the euro, it is natural for many people to have concerns, speculations and so on“, commented Datsov.
“When you have a 25-26% increase in wages in the public sector on average, when you have between 18% - again up to 25-26% increase in wages in other sectors - what exactly do you expect“, asked the former deputy minister.
“Inflation is generated by this income dynamic that currently exists“, he added and stated that in no way “we are impoverishing“.
“If you look, in almost every area of the market there are three or four people who already control part of things. I'm not saying that there is necessarily an agreement," Datsov also pointed out.
In the "Energy" sector, there is something to be done both in terms of efficiency, and in terms of dependence, and in terms of who can enter this market and exit it. Sometimes there are very interesting profits in this sector.", he also noted.
According to him, "from a political point of view" the first budget in euros is late.
"There is still a month and a half to submit the budget, but by now it should already be clear as a structure, with political priorities. We should have heard these political priorities from the government by now. The fact that we are not hearing them at the moment, I definitely think is not good, because it is simply not done that way. At some point you leave some doubt that there is ambiguity in the direction you are moving,", the former deputy minister noted.