OREANDA-NEWS The Russian economy is faced with a near-stagflationary situation, when some goods do not respond to changes in the key interest rate, while others do not increase in price due to lack of demand. Dmitry Belousov, head of the department for analysis and forecasting of macroeconomic processes at CMAKPa, announced the inflation gap, as quoted by the Vedomosti newspaper.

In the report "Etude 2. Inflation and anti-inflationary policy," the analyst noted that the effectiveness of monetary suppression of consumer Price Index growth is reduced by goods whose prices are not regulated by the Central Bank's policy: gasoline, regulated and household services, as well as the transfer to the final cost of additional costs: interest payments, leasing and rental rates. The tightening of monetary policy does not slow down inflation due to the combination of high debt burden and local monopolism of large companies, Belousov explained.

Sofia Donets, chief economist at T-Investments, agreed that prices are influenced by a number of factors that cannot be influenced through the key rate and questioned the need to respond to these processes by changing the rate. Oleg Buklemishev, director of the Center for Economic Policy Research at the Moscow State University Faculty of Economics, believes that more than half of the price growth dynamics is due to non-monetary factors.

Earlier, Boris Titov, the special representative of the President of the Russian Federation, called the situation in the Russian economy "cold snap" and even "winter," according to which, due to the fact that production costs are rising, and with it, prices will rise with a decrease in demand, the situation is approaching stagflation - a combination of rising prices and falling GDP — the way out of which It is "the most difficult macroeconomic decision," the businessman explained.