2023-11-22 11:52:36
Drought, structural water stress, climate change, viruses, geopolitical tensions… Everything to justify the frantic rise in prices of basic necessities. For months, the dizzying rise in food prices, in particular, has become very worrying, reducing the purchasing power of a large segment of the Tunisian population. A trip to one of the retail markets is enough to get an idea of the galloping inflation that has persisted for years. All in all, unsustainable prices are pushing many households to reduce their usual consumption.
The improvement of citizens’ purchasing power was once once more put at the forefront of decisions taken by the President of the Republic Kaïs Saied, during a meeting held last Saturday with the Ministers of the Interior, Agriculture and Commerce as well as the director of the National Oil Board, where he discussed the question of the increase in the prices of certain food products, notably olive oil. To this end, the Head of State ordered urgent measures to stem speculation, price manipulation, monopoly and sanction those who seek to alter the purchasing power of citizens.
This means that the rise in prices and the limited supply of certain categories of agricultural products have harmful consequences on the population. Inflationary surges have clearly demonstrated that the structure of internal prices is also influenced by price fluctuations on foreign markets, in particular for strategic food and energy raw materials. This dependence highlighted the vulnerability of household purchasing power, which marked a remarkable decline once morest a backdrop of a 0.7% change in the consumer price index in October 2023, housing prices. food by 13.1% over one year.
It is clear that the price level of these products remains high, despite the subsidies granted as part of the economic policies put in place to contain their inflation.
Beyond cyclical factors, the spread of inflation has been amplified, in recent years, by internal structural factors of the national economy, in particular those relating to insufficient supply, dysfunctions of the circuits of supply and marketing as well as the high degree of dependence of the components of domestic demand on imports.
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