partly due to a large pent - up need to consume among households following the pandemic. together, these factors in their turn contributed to a change in the nature of companies ’ pricing behaviour, which manifested itself in more frequent price increases and in a greater passthrough from cost increases to price increases. as global shocks have subsided and tight monetary policy has dampened demand, inflation has fallen back to 2 per cent. high inflation and interest rate hikes have had a significant impact on households and household - related sectors. but overall, the swedish economy has so far shown unexpected resilience. in particular, the labour market has been surprisingly strong given gdp growth. the sustained demand for labour has helped households in general to get through this tough period with continued labour income. there are some questions about what has happened to the structural economic relationships after the years of high inflation and, as always, there are risks of worse developments ahead. but so far i think there are reasons to be optimistic and i look forward to now entering a new phase of monetary policy. 16 speech figure 1. the riksbank ’ s policy rate per cent note. the solid line represents outcomes, the dashed line represents the riksbank ’ s forecast in the monetary policy report, march 2024. source : the riksbank. figure 2. household consumption of hotel and restaurant services annual percentage change note. fixed prices, seasonally adjusted data. source : statistics sweden. 17 speech figure 3. gdp developments in the context of three crises index note. index = 100 five quarters before the trough, x - axis shows the number of quarters. source : statistics sweden. figure 4. contributions to cpi inflation annual percentage change and percentage points note. the bars illustrate each price group ’ s contribution to the rate of increase in the cpif over the past twelve months. the contributions can be interpreted as the annual rate of increase in each group multiplied by the group ’ s weight in the cpif. sources : statistics sweden and the riksbank. 18 speech figure 5. frequency of price changes in cpi and cpif inflation share and annual percentage change note. share of price increases and decreases per month, 12 - month moving average. sources : statistics sweden and the riksbank. figure 6. drivers of cpif inflation percentage points and annual percentage change note. the bars illustrate the contribution of supply and demand factors to inflation according to a simple model decomposition. the model is estimated on national accounts data for 63 consumption areas

conducting a research project to analyse the development of prices at this micro level and gain a deeper knowledge of companies ’ pricing behaviour and how this is linked to price increases at the aggregate level. 8 for example, it turns out that the frequency of price changes, i. e. how often prices change, seems to play a more important role for inflation than the size of them. the analysis of prices at the micro level shows that the frequency of price changes – both raises and cuts – increased in the 2010s up to the pandemic, while the average size of the changes remained fairly stable. 9 there were significant differences both within and between product groups. in general, food and goods prices changed on average more frequently than services prices. in the early part of the 2020 pandemic, price increases were less frequent ( see figure 5 ). but from the summer of 2021, there was a dramatic change. the frequency of price increases then increased noticeably. at the same time, price cuts were more rare. the difference in the frequency of increases and decreases thus widened, while inflation rose rapidly. 10 perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the average size of price changes was only slightly larger during this period, so the rise in inflation mainly coincided with companies raising their prices more often on average, rather than raising them more. these are preliminary results from an ongoing research project. going forward, the riksbank will receive data on prices at the micro level on an ongoing basis and it is possible that the research project will be able to develop an inflation indicator 8 see, for example, e. ahlander, m. carlsson and m. klein ( 2023 ), “ price pass - through along the supply chain : evidence from ppi and cpi microdata ”, working paper no. 426, sveriges riksbank, or j. ewertzh, m. klein and o. tysklind ( 2022 ), “ price dynamics in sweden – insights from a new dataset ”, economic commentaries, no. 1, sveriges riksbank. the study uses data for the period 2010 – 2018. 9 the increase in the frequency of price changes in the 2010s is likely to be partly due to changes in measurement methods during the period. in 2013, for example, scanner data for food were widely introduced, causing the reported frequency of food price changes to increase significantly. 10 this does not seem to be unique for sweden. for example in canada, the companies ’ price