Industrial prices grew 0.3% m-to-m in August and this brought the annual index to 4.8% y-to-y. The results were exactly in line with the market expectations) and Patria's forecasts and they, thus, do not bring additional information. The gap between PPI and CPI narrowed to 0.7 percentage point from 1.1 percentage points in July. We expect he gap to narrow to 0.3 percentage points by the end of 2000.
We observe further recovery of agriculture prices that grew 13% y-to-y. While the statistical office does not provide monthly data, we estimate that agriculture prices grew 0.8% in August. On the other hand, service prices almost stagnated when they grew 0.1% in August and 2.4% y-to-y. Finally, construction prices grew 0.3% m-to-m and 4.2% y-to-y.
All this plethora of numbers only underlines the recent developments: producer prices grow roughly by 5% annually, only food prices have grown faster as they recover losses from 1999. There is little pressure for further inflation acceleration and we do not see a need to change our forecast of consumer inflation index that should hover around 4.3% until the end of this year.
(Ondrej Schneider)