The annual inflation rate in the euro zone rose slightly, to 7% in April, after 6.9% in March, interrupting a series of five consecutive monthly declines, Eurostat announced on Tuesday. The figure is worse than the expectations of analysts from Factset and Bloomberg who expected stagnation at 6.9%. He is expected to encourage the European Central Bank (ECB) to raise interest rates at a meeting on Thursday. Inflation had reached a record in October, at 10.6%, after a year and a half of uninterrupted rise, accelerated by the war in Ukraine.
Taking advantage of a decline in energy prices, it then fell from November to March, while remaining well above the 2% target set by the ECB. In April, the consumer price index was driven by a rebound in energy prices (fuel, electricity, gas, etc.), up 2.5% over one year, after a decline of 0 .9% in March. Inflation was also fueled by a slight acceleration in the prices of services, up 5.2%, or 0.1 point more than the previous month. The main contribution to the rise in prices came from food (including alcohol and tobacco), which again soared by 13.6% in April in the euro zone, still registering a slowdown compared to March (15 .5%).
Although also down by 0.4 points compared to March, the prices of industrial goods remained sharply up by 6.2% in April. Among the 20 countries sharing the single currency, Luxembourg (2.7%) and Belgium (3.3%) experienced the lowest inflation rate. Inflation rebounded by 0.2 points in France, to 6.9% in April. It does better than Germany (7.6%) and Italy (8.8%), but less well than Spain (3.8%). The highest rates were again recorded in the Baltic countries: Estonia (13.2%), Lithuania (13.3%) and Latvia (15%).
