Filenews 10 October 2024
Rising or falling fuel prices and lubricants is a key question that concerns thousands of consumers not only in Cyprus but also in Europe, because every change affects family income accordingly.
Since 2020, fuel and lubricant prices for personal transport in the EU have shown significant volatility. In some states fuel price reductions are faster and in others slower. Cyprus, as shown by the data presented by "F", is one of the countries where fuel price reductions are taking place at a snail's pace. In August this year, 24 EU countries reported negative annual rates of change or lower values than the same month last year. The average price decline in the EU-27 showed a decrease of 6.1%, while in Cyprus the price decline was -2.9%, one of the lowest recorded in European countries.
Sweden (-20.7%) reported the largest decline, followed by Belgium (-8.9%), Slovakia and Finland (-8.4%). Meanwhile, Slovenia (-2.0%) and Poland (-1.7%) recorded the smallest decrease. Prices in Malta remained unchanged and Romania (+2.4%) and Ireland (+4.0%) showed an increase in the annual rate of change. On the rest of the map of Europe, the changes in fuels on an annual basis (August 2024 compared to August 2023) as recorded by Eurostat are: Belgium -8,9%, Bulgaria -4,1%, Czech Republic -3,9%, Denmark -4,3%, Germany -6,9%, Estonia -5,7%, Greece -5,9%, Spain -8,1%, France -8,3%, Croatia -3,6%, Italy -5,3%, Latvia -4,3%, Lithuania -4,2%, Luxembourg -8,1%, Hungary -2,9%, Netherlands -5.6%, Austria -5.4%, Poland -1.7%, Portugal -8.1%, Slovenia -2%,
Eurostat reports that annual inflation rates were negative in May 2020 (-19.5%), but started to rise sharply in 2021, reaching +33.4% in November of the same year. The peak reached in June 2022 (+39.2%) and after that, it started to slow down, becoming negative in 2023. These fluctuations reflected the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In June 2023, the inflation rate for fuels and lubricants was at a low of -15.7%, but volatility has become less pronounced in recent months with smaller monthly price fluctuations. This happened in 2024. In August 2024, fuel and lubricant prices were 6.1% lower than August 2023. Eurostat technocrats point out that looking specifically at diesel and petrol from 2020, the data shows that prices last August were 7.4% and 5.5% lower than in the same month last year, respectively. Since 2020, the highest price increase was seen in June 2022, +45.2% for diesel and +35.7% for gasoline. While diesel price increases were generally lower than gasoline prices, oil prices rose faster than gasoline prices from September 2021 to March 2023. Since this month, diesel price increases have remained lower than those for gasoline, but the situation reversed again in June, July and August this year.
Relative to road transport, the share of petrol was highest in Cyprus (50%), the Netherlands (42%) and Malta (36%). The lowest shares were reported in Lithuania (13%), Latvia (14%) and Bulgaria (15%). In most EU countries, natural gas/diesel was the main source of energy for road transport, although there were noticeable differences between countries.
