Ankara.– The Turkish Central Bank estimated today that inflation will drop to 22.3% in 2023 from the official figure of 64.3% that it marked last year, although independent economists maintain that the real figure could even be double.
“We estimate that inflation will be 22.3% at the end of 2023 and 8.8% at the end of 2024,” the governor of the Turkish issuing bank, Sahap Kavcioglu, said in a statement.
At the end of December, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had already announced that inflation would drop rapidly to 40% in the first months of this year to reach 20% by the end of 2023.
The opposition regularly criticizes the tendency of the Central Bank and the official statistics institute to make statements in line with Erdogan’s announcements and expectations.
The president maintains the unorthodox position that low interest rates help reduce inflation and encourage spending, production, and employment, in what many analysts consider a political strategy for the general and presidential elections on December 14. May.
The president has changed the governor of the Central Bank four times since July 2019, replacing economists with a more orthodox vision.
The Central Bank maintained interest rates at 9% last December, after having lowered them by 150 points the previous month.
The official interannual inflation data for 2022, announced in December, was 64.27%, from 84.4 the previous month.
However, the Inflation Research Group (ENAG), made up of independent economists and academics, maintains that real inflation in 2022 was 137.5%.