Inflation is often assumed to affect all people in the same way. However, differences in spending patterns across households and differences in price changes across goods and services lead to a different inflation rate for each household. In this paper, we estimate inflation rates for various population groups in Greece during the period 1999-2004 as well as the causes of differences between them. Our results suggest that these differences are considerable and the most of them can be traced to changes in the relative prices of food & non-alcoholic beverages, housing, and alcoholic beverages & tobacco. We find that socially-sensitive population groups such as pensioners, the unemployed, the economically weak and more generally individuals facing a relatively high risk of poverty suffer disproportionately from inflation. Moreover, the distributional impact of price changes seems to have a negative effect on various inequality and poverty indices.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Bank of Greece, Economic Research Department in its journal Economic Bulletin.