Brussels, 16/10/2015 (Agence Europe) - Annual inflation in the eurozone stood at -0.1% in September, down from 0.1% in August, according to figures released on Friday 16 October by the EU's statistics office, Eurostat.
For the EU as a whole, prices fell by 0.1% in September 2015 compared with 0.0% in August.
In September 2015, negative annual rates were observed in seventeen member states: Cyprus (-1.9%), Romania (-1.5%) and Spain (-1.1%), Slovenia (-1.0%), Bulgaria (-0.9%), Greece and Lithuania (-0.8%), Finland (-0.7%), Poland (-0.6%), Croatia and Slovakia (-0.5%), Latvia (-0.4%), Estonia (-0.3%), Germany and Luxembourg (-0.2%), Hungary and the United Kingdom (-0.1%). There was zero inflation in Ireland, sluggish inflation in France (+0.1%) and in Italy (+0.2%), moderate inflation in Austria, Portugal and Sweden (+0.9%) and the highest annual rate was recorded in Malta (+1.6%). Compared with August 2015, annual inflation fell in eighteen Member States, remained stable in four and rose in six.
The largest upward impacts to euro area annual inflation came from restaurants & cafés (+0.12 percentage points), vegetables (+0.11 pp) and tobacco (+0.08 pp), while transport fuel (-0.71 pp) and heating oil (-0.25 pp) had the biggest downward impacts.
The return of falling prices in the eurozone is bad news for the ECB, whose mass buying of public and private bonds, 'quantitative easing,' is finding it difficult to restore price rises to the target of inflation of just under 2%. The question being asked of the ECB's Governing Council, which meets on Thursday 22 October, is whether to boost non-conventional monetary policy by extending the range of securities bought in the QE programme and/or the duration of QE, which is currently scheduled to continue until September 2016. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)