El euro y la inflación percibida

Resumen

The launching of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and of the euro has been considered as one of the main changes the International Monetary System (IMS) has experimented since the Jamaica Agreements of 1976. However, coinciding with the euro cash changeover in January 2002, an interesting phenomenon was observed: the dissociation between measured inflation and perceived inflation generally characterised by higher levels of perceived inflation when euro banknotes and coins started to circulate as compared to similar levels of measured inflation when the legacy currencies were in circulation. This phenomenon was easily observed for the whole EMU area during the first two years of circulation of the single currency i.e. 2002 and 2003. The unique circumstances surrounding the 2002 euro cash changeover, which was considered a historic moment for the vast majority of European citizens and the international financial and monetary community, and given the tremendous impact the use of a new currency has on the daily life of consumers, made very complex for them to assimilate information on price developments, price rounding-up warnings, counterfeiting warnings, new banknotes and coins design, new denominations, before and after the introduction of the single currency. This might very well have led to the observed dissociation between measured inflation and perceived inflation. In these circumstances, due to the over-exposure to information on price developments, consumers could hardly compute all prices of each consumption article they buy when building their perception of inflation, primarily at a time when they are over-exposed to information on prices, thus having to be rationally inattentive to the price developments of a number of articles and rationally attentive to other articles to which they attribute more relevance. When looking at related literature, it is noticeable that after the euro cash changeover a number of publications presented studies on price developments either for a reduced number of goods and services or for a reduced number of Member States; whilst other publications were focused on the monetary illusion caused by the cash changeover, due to either the use itself of a new currency or to the use of a wrong conversion unit. Finally, a series of publications on consumer psychology focused on this issue, many of them based on evidential experience on how consumers develop intuitively their price in the new currency, concluding that this process requires a considerable amount of time, either by becoming familiar with the use of the new currency, or as a consequence of requiring increasing stimuli in the form of price changes for developing the same perception in the form of Index of Perceived Inflation (IPI). This Thesis explores the area of the influence of the use of banknotes as a means of payment on the gap observed between the measured and the perceived inflation, focusing on the cash changeover period and quantifying the magnitude of the dissociation produced as the difference between the inflation measured by authorities using the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), with the inflation perceived by the European consumers using the IPI index. The sources of data used in this Thesis are, as indicator of price developments, national monthly data of the 39 HICP subcomponents, as published by Eurostat and as indicator of the inflation perceived by consumers, the IPI index used national monthly data, as compiled by the European Commission (EC). The pre-euro period considered was from 1996 to 2001 and the euro changeover period the years 2002 and 2003. The Thesis follows a sequential development for finding a relationship between the price developments reported by the authorities and the inflation perceived by the European consumers, for later introducing the use of cash in this relationship. Thus, first it is conducted an assessment of the evolution of the prices of each subcomponent of the HICP using a number of linearising parameters aiming a direct and comparable measurement among subcomponents and across Member States for identifying potential common patterns. The result of this initial exercise is the evidence of how the 2002 euro cash changeover caused an inflexion point in merely all data series of prices and Member States. However, the magnitude and direction of this inflexion varied broadly across countries and across consumption articles meaning there was something which could be called “euro effect” on prices, but not necessarily meaning a generalised prices increase or a commonly followed pattern. A second study consisted on an attempt of finding evidences of adaptive expectations behaviour on European consumers by extrapolating all data series of measured prices for the 2002-2003 period using the values published for 1996-2001 and comparing them with the published values 2002-2003, in order to identify patterns between this comparison and the perceived inflation gap. Given that no common patterns were obtained from this comparison, it can be concluded that no evidences were found that the gap between the perceived and the measured inflation was caused by the difference between the measured prices after the 2002 euro cash changeover and the prices the consumer might had expected for that time by following the 1996-2001 evolution of prices. Continuing searching for plausible evidence of a relationship between the perceived and the measured inflation, the Thesis quantified the level of rational inattention to price changes of European consumers before and after the euro cash changeover by identifying the actual series of goods and services, at each Member State and time period, used by consumers for building their inflation perception. This identification was done by selecting the HICP subcomponents which showed significant correlation between their monthly price evolution and the IPI index of the same Member state at the period of time under study i.e. 1996-2001 and 2002-2003. For the sake of completeness, this calculation was done by duplicate, considering the measured inflation as monthly and as yearly change of prices. This exercise gives interesting results regarding the limited series of goods and services which can explain with their price evolution the perception of consumers at each Member State and time period. Once found a relationship between the perceived inflation and the measured inflation, the use of cash by consumers had to be brought to the equation. Here, the Thesis considered two aspects of the habits of consumers: the use of cash as a means of payment and the frequency of payments for consumption articles. In the absence of detailed information or literature available on this topic, an ad-hoc survey was designed, prepared and launched to each Member State of the EMU for gathering the data required. The results obtained in the survey were summarised in two indexes developed in this Thesis, the Index of Cash Payments (IPM index) and the Index of Frequency of Payments (ICP index) index which are calculated for each Member State and HICP subcomponent. The IPM index quantifies in a 1-5 scale (where 1=never and 5=always) the propensity to use cash by consumers when procuring the goods and services listed in a particular HICP subcomponent. Similarly, the ICP index quantifies in a 0-365 scale (where 0= never, 1=daily and 365=yearly) the average period in days of payments of the goods and services listed in certain HICP subcomponent. This quantification of the use of cash or the frequency of payments for each HICP subcomponent permits sorting out the relevant ones regarding payments behaviour on the relationship between perceived and measured inflation: those with high IPM index and with low ICP index. The actual influence of the use of cash on the relationship between the perceived and the measured inflation is measured by the relevance given by consumers to the consumption articles paid in cash or frequently purchased and used for building their perceived inflation, expressed by two new indexes developed by this Thesis, the IRU and the ICU indexes. These indexes quantify for a given country and period of time the percentage of the total consumption basket of goods and services used by the consumers to build their perceived inflation and that are either frequently purchased or bought preferably using cash respectively. A comparison of the national values of these IRU and ICU indexes before and after the euro cash changeover with the perceived inflation gap observed at each Member State, shows how consumption habits, and in particular the use of euro banknotes and coins at country level influenced the differences between the inflation perceived by consumers and the inflation measured by the authorities at each period of time period under study. This final comparison is done using two additional sets of HICP subcomponents: those which, in addition, showed a higher arithmetic price increase than the HICP itself and those which showed a higher geometric price increase than the HICP itself. Out of these additional comparisons, no evidences are found of higher sensitivity of consumers to consumption articles which had higher price increase than the average when building their perception of inflation. From the final comparisons, it is also found that before the introduction of the eurobanknotes and coins, the building of the inflation perception by consumers at Member State level had a higher correlation with the evolution of monthly prices; whilst with the introduction of the single currency, this correlation was also important with the yearly evolution of prices. Finally, this comparison of IRU and ICU indexes at EMU level shows that the euro cash changeover caused a higher perceived inflation gap in those Member States where a higher proportion of the consumption basket is either paid in cash or is constituted by frequently purchased articles and which price evolution is used for building the perception of inflation by consumers. Therefore, in stable conditions, consumers tend to perceive higher inflation in those countries where higher attention is paid to price changes of articles of frequent purchase or paid in cash. As future work, it is foreseen to enhance the content of this Thesis working with all subcomponents of the HICP split by marketable and non-marketable goods and services, in order to identify potential evidences of the Balassa-Samuelson effect after the introduction of the euro. It is also planned by the author, if sufficient resources were to be available, to re-calculate the indexes on consumption habits on a broader statistical ground. Finally, a more ambitious project should be the development of an IT application capable to automathise all the calculi developed for this Thesis able to adjust the desired point of inflexion to any marked date like e.g. the collapse of Lehman Broders or the evolution of the financial crisis into an economic crisis in order to assess how these events affected the the perception of inflation by consumers.