Annual inflation in Moldova will decrease from 30.24% in 2022 to 4.2% in 2023 due to refusing the Russian gas and due to a number of other elements as well - Anca Dragu.
Governor of the National Bank of Moldova said this while answering questions within the first podcast of this year "Give Sense to Money". She emphasized that Russian gas was the main cause of inflation in the country. "Rising energy prices have been the main driver of price increases in Europe. The case of Moldova was even more special because the dependence on Russian gas was total. The fact that in the last 2 years we see that this dependence has significantly decreased thanks to the EU, especially Romania, made possible this softening of gas and electricity prices," the Head of the National Bank said. According to her, at the same time, there was also state support, which led to a faster reduction in gas and electricity prices, and this state support helped a lot, but inflation depends largely on perception. "There is also a component of inflation such as inflation expectations. So, inflation expectations in turn generate inflation, so inflation has a self-generating nature once you get into that trend. But at the time that this reliance on Russian gas was known, it created uncertainty, insecurity, somehow modeling inflationary behavior. Thus, these measures, through which Moldova had gas reserves in Romania, through which imports of gas and electricity from Romania were secured, caused a reaction to inflation, a moderate increase in prices and a real contribution to the sharp decline in inflation. There were also several other elements, we should mention the good agricultural year and some measures taken by the National Bank of Moldova to limit lending, to introduce some norms on consumer debt, which reduced lending to the population," Anca Dragu emphasized. // 05.02.2024 – InfoMarket
