Price relief in Covid-19 pandemic: exercise about the impact on Colombia’s inflation

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La serie Borradores de Economía es una publicación de la Subgerencia de Estudios Económicos del Banco de la República. Los trabajos son de carácter provisional, las opiniones y posibles errores son responsabilidad exclusiva del autor y sus contenidos no comprometen al Banco de la República ni a su Junta Directiva.

Autor o Editor
Caicedo-García, Edgar
Hernández-Ortega, Ramón
Martínez-Cortés, Nicolás

The series Borradores de Economía (Working Papers on Economics) contributes to the dissemination and promotion of the work by researchers from the institution. On multiple occasions, these works have been the result of collaborative work with individuals from other national or international institutions. This series is indexed at Research Papers in Economics (RePEc). The opinions contained in this document are the sole responsibility of the author and do not commit Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.

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Abstract

This document offers an exercise that quantifies on the Colombia CPI the maximum possible impact in accounting terms of some price reliefs decreed by the national government. This impact would not necessarily coincide with the official CPI figures, due to the presence of multiple factors that also affect these prices and some assumptions. Most of these reliefs will expire between August of 2020 and the end of 2022. The exercise involves approximations of the tax level of the consumer basket and assumes that the reliefs are fully transmitted to the CPI. On the other hand, this same methodology was applied to quantify the effect of “day without VAT” events. The results suggest that the reliefs sum a maximum effect close to 1,9% on the total CPI. On the other hand, we found that the influence of the day without VAT is small, under the assumption that DANE collects prices with high frequency in the month.