Inflation in Brazil registered a generalized high for all income groups in December last year, says the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA).
For the second year in a row, prices in Brazil were above the ceiling set by the federal government.
However, there was a diffuse deceleration throughout the year in relation to 2021. Last month, IPEA pointed out that prices rose 0.62%, but families with a monthly income of up to R$900 felt inflation rise above this average, 0.71%.
Richer families also suffered from higher prices. For them, prices were 0.29% in November and rose to 0.50% in December.
For IPEA, the families with the highest income have a monthly income of more than R$9 thousand.
The generalized high is related to two main issues: food inflation, which has been resisting high prices in Brazil, and readjustments in the values of health plans.
Even so, when comparing inflation in 2022 with that of 2021, it can be seen that there was a generalized deceleration by income bracket.
In 2021, inflation, measured by IBGE’s ICPA, was a little more than 10%, and in 2022 it was just over 5%.
The poorest families had inflation of the national average in 2022, 6.35%. The same movement occurred with the richest families, who experienced inflation of 6.83% last year.
IPEA researcher Maria Andrea Lameiras evaluates the behavior of inflation and talks about the perspectives for 2023:
“For families with lower purchasing power, the main factors that weighed in December were the readjustments in personal hygiene products and food.”
“For higher income families, the impacts came from readjustments in health plans and recreation services. With the result for December, we can see that in the year 2022, the lower-middle-income families were the ones that presented the lowest inflation rate, at 5.69%.”
“Upper-income families, in turn, had the highest inflation rate in the year, 5.83%. Very-low-income families showed a rate of 5.35%. In general, the main pressure on inflation for families in 2022 came from high food prices,” she says.