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Hungarian Price Monitoring System May Be Used in Slovakia

Hungary Today 2024.03.14.

One of the strong campaign themes of the Slovak early parliamentary elections on September 30, 2023, was to curb the rise in food prices. Although inflation has since fallen to around four percent, the issue is still on the agenda, reports Világgazdaság.

Slovak Finance Minister Ladislav Kamenický believes that the establishment of an effective price monitoring system alone would curb price hikes. “The head of the Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency said that as soon as we monitor prices, they would decrease moderately. We are planning to go to Hungary, where an interesting solution is to compare the price evolution of the same products offered by different companies, in particular different cheeses, eggs, bread, butter, and other basic foodstuffs,” the Finance Minister noted. The system allows customers to compare the prices of different chains, he added.

I would prefer to buy the price monitoring system, Hungarians already have it, it would be cheaper than building a new system ourselves,”

Kamenický explained. The Minister was referring to arfigyelo.gvh.hu, which has been operational since July 2023, and tracks the prices of some 60 basic food products offered in around 1,200 shops. The site updates the data daily.

Martin Krajčovič, president of the Slovak Modern Trade Alliance, said that this had already been discussed with the finance ministry, but it was not yet clear how many products would be monitored if it was implemented. Robert Fico’s government has not yet decided on the issue. The costs of running the system would be borne mainly by the state.

Fact

In Hungary, since the introduction of the food price freeze, several other measures have been taken to protect consumers, such as the introduction of mandatory in-store promotions and online price monitoring, and from March 1, 2024, an awareness campaign on the reduced packaging of products. These government measures have already helped to bring down inflation, which had fallen to single digits (9.9 percent) by October last year, and was only 3.8 percent higher in January this year than the year before.

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Via Világgazdaság; Featured image Pixabay


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