Retail inflation was 6% in January and wholesale inflation was 6.5%. Both jumped from their December values. But the increase in imported products was much higher: 8.5%, despite this the official dollar advanced only 5.8% in the first month of the year. Over the same period, the blue dollar rose 10.6%.
What logic do the increases in imported products follow? Entrepreneurs and traders using inputs from abroad know that each supplier updates their price list according to their realities and explanations for the increases usually point to delays in the SIRA – the new import system that went into effect on 17 October.
“The deterioration of the external sector and the government resistance to validate a devaluation of the peso that can make ends meet, led to an increasingly tight turnstile for import authorisationsand the scarcity of inputs and parts is reflected in the dynamics of the evolution of the wholesale prices of imported goods”, explain Jorge Vasconcelos and Maximiliano Gutiérrez in the latest report by IERAL, of the Mediterranean Foundation.
In January, this index which measures the INDEC had a monthly change of 8.5%, after 8% in December and 8.2% in November. “For January this year, the 12-month cumulative wholesale price of imported goods has reached 111%, but the curve has steepened more recently,” add the economists.
“The moving average of the last three months is 8.23%, a value that annualized reaches 158.4%well above the annualized exchange rate change recorded in the last quarter, close to 100%”compare.
Thus, the value of imported products is less and less tied to that of the official dollar. Its evolution has more to do with product shortages, uncertainty about substitution (not so much the price at which it can be substituted, but whether it can be substituted) and the march of the blue dollar.
The gap between the wholesale dollar and the blue, which reached 150% last year after the departure of Martín Guzmán from the Ministry of Economy and is today about 95%. And companies believe that sooner or later there will be some movement to reduce this difference.
Precisely, wholesale inflation of imported products began to grow more than the general one since last July, when Sergio Massa took office at the Economy. Import prices have been rising on average for more than six months two points more than the general index and more and more of the rise of the dollar.
Source: Clarin
