Rīgas Centrāltirgū. Foto - Zane Bitere, LETA
When we speak about inflation, we usually present a number that describes how much prices of a representative basket of goods have changed over the past year. In April 2024, the most recent data point available at the time of writing, inflation was 1.1%, i.e. prices of this representative basket of goods were 1.1% higher than in April 2023. This is way down from inflation’s peak, which was in September 2022 where prices were 22.2% higher than in September 2021, see Figure 1 where I start in January 2020 – when inflation was low and steady; before the pandemic started and obviously before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But when the inflation rate changes so much, it can be instructive to look at some other measures of price changes for some deeper insight.
Figure 1: Inflation, year-on-year with monthly data, 2020-I – 2024-IV
