Guardian for household basket: Will it tame accuracy in Greece? What do the citizens answer | News about the Economy
“The government made an agreement with supermarkets to sell basic products at fixed prices. Is but enough?”, asks o Guardian in his article about its explosion accuracy in Greece and the government’s initiative to limit it with the household basket.
The Guardian specifically writes:
“Even before the cost of living crisis was officially recognized, it had reached Greece. If it weren’t for the increased number of homeless people on the streets, most of them crowding around tourist issues, or the unimaginably high energy bills – although all of these predate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“It was there for everyone to see on the supermarket shelves,” she says Panagiota Kalapotharakouwhich is the head of the consumer rights organization EKPOIZO.
“Eighteen ago there were so many products with prices that a large number of Greeks could not afford. Costs were rising well before the war in Ukraine».
It came as no surprise to consumer groups, then, that when the debate turned to the need for relief measures to deal with rising inflation, the government chose to focus on basic goods. What emerged was the novel concept of the “household basket”: supermarkets agreed with the government to sell around 51 basic food items – from flour to fish – at fixed prices.
The measure, discussed around a long table at the commerce ministry, went into effect in early November. Center-right government officials intend the program, which is scheduled to last until the end of winter, to be a bulwark for the most vulnerable against the inflationary storm. No state subsidies are foreseen.
“We spent weeks sitting around this table working on this with representatives of the supermarket market and the competition commission,” says Sotiris Anagnostopoulos, the general secretary of the ministry. “In politics you have to predict what will come next. The cost of living crisis is a huge challenge, perhaps the biggest we have faced since the adoption of the euro.”
Chains across the country have signed up to the program, selling products with blue home basket labels.
With the country’s annual rate of consumer inflation currently at 10% – down from a high of 12% in September – the government insists the initiative has succeeded in stabilizing prices at a time of uncertainty and, in some cases, not happening at lower level. “What was never expected was the price war we saw in the big supermarket chains,” says Anagnostopoulos. “It was surprising and pleasant because in general Greeks have a much lower purchasing power.”
Forced to survive on some of the lowest wages in the EU – at less than €1,200 a month, the average monthly wage is about a quarter of what it is in Germany – Greeks have felt the impact of rising prices perhaps more than other EU states. Rising prices were recently found to be the single biggest problem facing Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ government by polling firm Marc.
The survey, conducted at the end of November, showed that almost 60% of respondents did not believe that the “household basket” could contain inflationary pressures in a market where regulatory practices have traditionally been weak.
“To be honest, it’s a bit of nonsensenot that I would want to say it openly as I am a public sector employee,” said a woman browsing the shelves of a supermarket near the ministry where she works. “It is very much aimed at people with low incomes. It has things you never want to buy, like this canned coffee for example.”
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