Inflation fell this month in Belgium, as lower energy prices continued to ease financial pressure on Belgian consumers.
According to a study published on Thursday by Statbel, Belgium's official statistics office, the annual headline rate fell to 4.15% in June, down from 5.20% in May. Headline inflation has now fallen fairly steadily since October 2022, when it peaked at 12.27%.
Even more promisingly, core inflation – which strips out energy and volatile food prices and is widely considered to provide a better estimate of underlying price pressures – decreased from 8.70% to 8.14%.
Statbel attributed the headline rate's decline to falling energy inflation, which decreased to -25.82% this month from -21.98% in May. It further noted that energy's net contribution to the headline rate is also now heavily negative (-3.48 percentage points).
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Despite the welcome decline, Belgium's headline rate remains more than two times higher than the European Central Bank's 2% target rate and more than two-and-a-half times greater than it was two years ago. Core inflation, meanwhile, is roughly seven-and-a-half times higher than in June 2021.
On Twitter, Stijn Baert, an Associate Professor of Economics at Ghent University, cautioned against an over-optimistic assessment of the data, and pointed out that this month's fall in the annual headline rate is largely a statistical artefact of its increase from May to June last year.
"Has life recently become much cheaper? Nay," he said. "This month was only 0.1% cheaper than May. The fact that the inflation rate is falling sharply, from 5.2% to 4.2%, is because June 2022, with which we are now comparing, was a lot more expensive than May 2022, with which we compared last month."
