Turkey’s inflation rate slows for third month: Data

Turkey’s inflation rate slowed for a third successive month in January, official data showed Friday, after a record that threw the economy into chaos and imperiled President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chances in May 14 polls.

Consumer prices growing at an annualized rate of 57.7 percent in January compared to 64.3 percent in December, according to the state statistics agency.

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It peaked at 85.5 percent in October – the highest rate of Erdogan’s two-decade rule.

The reading delivers a welcome boost for Erdogan heading into a close presidential and parliamentary election in which he will seek to extend his mercurial rule until 2028.

Economists attribute the slowdown in part to a slide in the price of Turkey’s energy imports.

Natural gas prices have fall back to early 2022 levels after soaring in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But a part of the slowdown is also linked to a statistical anomaly that compares the past months’ prices to a meteoric pace that followed a late 2021 currency collapse.

The rate “will drop further this quarter, perhaps below 45 percent year-on-year in March, as the surge in prices following the 2021 currency crisis falls out of the annual price comparison,” Capital Economics said in a report.

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