National Bank of Serbia research finds inflation was up to 2.6 percentage points higher for low-consumption households in 2022–23

The National Bank of Serbia published a research note in its “It’s Useful to Know” series analysing how inflation affected Serbian households differently depending on the structure of their consumer baskets. Using Household Consumption Survey data split into five consumption-based quintiles, the analysis constructed quintile-specific inflation measures and found that, during the peak of inflationary pressures in 2022 and the first half of 2023, lower-consumption households faced higher inflation than higher-consumption households. The divergence was attributed mainly to expenditure composition, with food and utilities accounting for a larger share of spending in the lowest-consumption quintile and seeing the strongest price increases. The widest gap between inflation in the first and fifth quintiles occurred in mid-2023 at around 2.6 percentage points. From the start of 2024, inflation slowed, supported by monetary policy tightening and base effects, and the deceleration was faster for lower-consumption households as food price pressures eased; this pattern held through most of 2025, aside from May to August when adverse weather lifted food prices, particularly fruit and vegetables. The research also assessed real wage dynamics by deflating nominal wage growth using the quintile-specific inflation measures, showing real stagnation or decline across most groups in 2022 with the largest fall among the lowest-income households, stagnation for that group in 2023, and more favourable outcomes in 2024 and 2025 linked to lower inflation and increases in the minimum wage.