Unprecedented hike in fuel prices: Germany

BERLIN, April 25, (KUNA): The Federal Statistical Office of Germany announced that fuel prices had witnessed an unprecedented hike due a number of causes including the crisis in Ukraine.

The office said in a press release that it studied the development of prices of mineral oil, mineral oil products and natural gas in the past 50 years and at various stage in the economic process.

It turned out that the year-on-year increase in motor fuel prices in the past decades was never as large as in the current reference month March 2022.

Recent price increases at petrol stations larger than during the 2 oil crises of 1973/1974 and 1979/1980 and the financial market crisis of 2008/2009, it added.

Motor fuel prices in March 2022 for consumers went up by 41.9 percent almost half from a year earlier, indicated the office, adding that the prices of diesel also increased in the same period by 62.6 percent.

The dynamic development of energy prices in the context of the COVID-19 crisis has further accelerated as a result of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.

Reports by five major German economic institutes in the last week had shown that inflation this year would reach 6.1 percent due to the war on Ukraine, which began on February 24th.