MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Euro zone inflation turns negative putting more pressure for ECB stimulus

The bank's inflation target is below but close to 2%. The fall was driven mainly by lower energy costs (6.3%) due to the plunging price of oil.

Inflation in the Euro-zone has turned negative, official figures have shown, with prices in December 0.2% lower than the same month a year earlier. The tip into deflation adds pressure on the European Central Bank (ECB) to take further action to stimulate the bloc's economy.

 The bank's inflation target is below but close to 2%. The fall was driven mainly by lower energy costs due to the plunging price of oil.

Energy prices in December were 6.3% lower than a year earlier. If energy prices are excluded, December's inflation rate for the Euro-zone was 0.6%, the same as in November.

Prices for food, alcohol and tobacco were estimated to be unchanged from a year earlier, after rising 0.5% in November. Prices for services, which had held steady in November, are estimated to have risen 1.2% compared with December 2013.

It is the first time the Euro zone has experienced deflation since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. The estimate from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, will be updated later in the month.

James Ashley, chief European economist at RBC Capital Markets, said Wednesday's data was a footnote to the wider economic picture. Arguments over whether inflation was just above or below 0%, and whether the tumbling oil was to blame, were “specious,” he said.

“The far more important question is why inflation is anywhere near 0% in the first place: in our view, the inconvenient truth for policymakers is that, in large part, that is a reflection of the failure of policy, both fiscal and monetary.”

ECB is increasingly expected to launch a new round of economic stimulus measures, or quantitative easing (QE), and the latest numbers will cement expectations. However, Germany reportedly opposes more QE.

The situation in Greece also complicates the issue. Deflation increases the debt burden, and Greece's indebtedness to its international bailout creditors is a key issue in the current general election campaign.

Greece's left-wing anti-austerity Syriza party, leading the election polls, wants to re-negotiate the terms of the bailout, sparking fresh worries about the stability of the Euro zone.

On Wednesday, Greece's long-term borrowing rate rose above 10%. Yields on the 10-year bonds were trading at 10.07%, up from 9.746% on Tuesday. The main stock market in Athens was also trading down more than 2%.

Separately, Eurostat reported that the unemployment rate in the Euro zone remained at 11.5% in November, unchanged from October, but down from 11.9% in November 2013.

Among the euro-bloc states, the lowest unemployment rates in November were in Austria (4.9%) and Germany (5.0%), and the highest in Greece (25.7% in September 2014) and Spain (23.9%).