By Vitalii Kravchuk, Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting
Mat O’Brien’s recent contribution to the Washington Post’s Wonkblog on hyperinflation in Ukraine has had a huge impact. Drawing on work by Johns Hopkins professor Steve Hanke, O’Brien argues that, although the official rate of inflation from the Ukrainian State Committee on Statistics (Ukrstat) is 28.5 per cent, in reality it is more like 272 per cent.
Hanke is famous for his research on Zimbabwean hyperinflation, where the government was unable to calculate inflation and an alternative method had to be used. The main argument of Hanke’s article and of O’Brien’s blog post is that when a country’s currency collapses, it pushes up the prices of imports, which spill over to other prices. In this situation, Hanke argues, the true inflation rate can be calculated using “a rather straightforward application of a standard, time-tested economic theory” in the form of purchasing power parity, based on the free-market exchange rate (often the black market rate). This formula has been bluntly used in the case of Ukraine.
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