Inflation in Slovenia

A short history of inflation in Slovenia

Leaving the Dinar (1991 to 1993)

Slovenia declared independence in June 1991 and left the Yugoslav dinar within months, introducing the tolar in October of that year while inflation inherited from the federal currency was still running at several hundred per cent a year. Its ten-day war was brief compared with what followed elsewhere, and the country avoided the destruction that made stabilisation so much harder for its neighbours.

Convergence and the Euro (1993 to 2007)

Inflation was brought down steadily rather than in a single shock, with the tolar managed against the Deutsche Mark and later the euro, and Slovenia became the first of the post-communist states to adopt the euro, on 1 January 2007.

Post-Covid Inflation (2021 to 2023)

In Slovenia, prices rose fastest in July 2022, at 11.7%. The causes of the post-Covid inflation were global in nature, beginning with the lockdowns: factories and ports closed and the shipping between them fell out of sequence, so goods took longer to make and longer to arrive. Governments had spent heavily supporting household incomes through those closures, so when restrictions lifted there was money waiting to be spent and not enough on the shelves to spend it on. Then in February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, disrupting two of the world's largest suppliers of wheat, fertiliser, oil and gas at once, and the cost of everything grown, heated or transported rose with them.

Because the causes were shared, so was the timing: most countries peaked within a few months of one another in late 2022. The major inflation events covers this episode and the others in more detail.