Greece and Cyprus have not followed EU states in increasing costs in cultural goods, per the recent data from Eurostat.
According to the report, many sectors are registering price hikes, including culture. Increases above the general inflation were observed at the EU level in some cultural goods, including newspapers and periodicals, when comparing July 2022 with July 2021. These increases were observed in all Member States, except for Greece.
Compared with July 2021, in July 2022, there was an increase in the 'museums, libraries, zoological gardens' sub-index among the EU Member States. Nevertheless, prices remained stable in Cyprus and Luxembourg while a decrease was reported for Malta
While in July 2021 the all-items HICP and the cultural services indices stood at similar levels (108.68 and 106.86, respectively), in July 2022, the all-items HICP index stood at 119.31 and cultural services at 109.77, showing a clear divergent tendency.
Despite the price increases noted, price decreases were observed for some items. Between July 2021 and July 2022, this concerned products from 'equipment for the reception, recording and reproduction of sound and picture'.
Between 2016 and 2021, the highest average growth rate in prices of cultural products at the EU level was recorded by the ‘newspapers and periodicals’ sub-index. This sub-index grew at an average pace of 4.0 % per year, and its growth rate was 2.4 percentage points above all-items HICP. This shows that inflation in this group of products was higher than the overall inflation in consumer prices.
For two other cultural sub-indices, ‘cultural services’ and ‘books’, the growth rate was positive but lower than all-items HICP. In turn, the largest rate of decrease between 2016 and 2021 was recorded by the sub-index ‘equipment for the reception, recording and reproduction of sound and picture’ (on average -4.1% annually).
The 2020-2021 period shows that the rate of decrease of the sub-index ‘equipment for the reception, recording and reproduction of sound and picture’ has slowed significantly. There has also been a slight increase for the sub-index ‘information processing equipment’ in this period.
[Eurostat]