In the 1960s and 1970s, chronic inflation was attributed to powerful political group interests with radically divergent policy demands; the power of labour unions to demand high wages for workers, often in obsolete economic sectors, conflicted with the somewhat feudal political structures of the affected countries.
Other sources have argued that chronic inflation is caused by governments seeking to optimize seignorage taxes in order to pay most efficiently for public programmes, or because the societies in which it developed have consistently imported more than they can export and their currencies have had to devalue constantly to make their imports more expensive without elasticity being sufficient to reduce demand.
[7] Along the same lines, there have also been arguments for demographic causes of chronic inflation as resulting from populations growing more rapidly than production in developing nations from the 1950s to the 1980s, and until today in sub-Saharan Africa.
Increasingly it is also thought that environmental or ecological stresses and disasters can trigger a period of systemic inflation by governments unable to effectively handle the situation.
During the 1990s, thanks to the convertibility plan, which pegged the austral (and, afterward, the peso) to the United States Dollar value, inflation rates decreased nearly to 0%.
When pro-reform forces came into power in the spring 1997, an ambitious economic reform package, including introduction of a currency board regime and pegging the Bulgarian Lev to the German Deutsche Mark (and subsequently to the euro), was agreed to with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the economy began to stabilize.
[8] Inflation first became persistent at the tail end of the 1930s as the government began a process of import substitution, rising steady to 84 percent in 1955.
Pinochet's free-market economic policy gradually ended chronic inflation, which stabilised in single figures for the first time in forty-five years.
Political instability has also contributed greatly to the fall in the Guinean franc's value in recent years due to a series of coups following the ouster of longtime military strongman Lansana Conté and mass protests.
Years of constant war and rebuilding resulted in large amounts of government spending, with international sanctions creating shortages and limits on borrowing.
[12] As Hirohito prepared for war to gain access to rubber and mineral resources, Japan began experiencing steady inflation from 1934.
Starting in the late 1980s financial aid and trade with the USSR greatly decreased, which began a two-decade long period of high inflation that began to accelerate by 1996 with the East Asian financial crisis which had severely impacted Laos, burdened with large amounts of foreign debt coupled with very slow growth.
As a result, the country suffered a severe case of capital flight and over a decade of chronic inflation and peso devaluation.
Mozambique was one of the world's poorest and most underdeveloped countries when it became independent of Portugal in 1975, the last colonial power to relinquish its African territories.
Many of the exchange and time limits for conversion were either dropped or extended after prices soared over 1000% in some regions in the first week as people rushed to buy as much things as they could.
According to a September 2009 BBC report,[14] some department stores in Pyongyang even stopped accepting North Korean won, instead insisting upon payment in U.S. dollars, Chinese renminbi, euros, or even Japanese yen.
The largest and longest period was in the 1980s and 1990s; inflation peaked in 1996, increasing from 60% in January to an all-time high of 118.8% in July of that same year.
Revenue from petroleum exports accounts for more than 50% of the country's GDP and roughly 95% of total exports, and after decades of some of the strongest economic growth in South America the trend went into sharp reversal as oil prices began their steady drop following the end of the 1970s oil crisis, from which both OPEC member and non-member producers had benefited greatly.
This period of economic contraction in Venezuela coincided with the beginning of the 1980s oil glut, which saw large cutbacks in production and state revenue.
Since the early 2000s the administration of Hugo Chavez responded to the ongoing crisis with a series of often flawed price controls, state acquisition and reappropriation of both public and private assets and funds, and a revaluation of the bolivar in 2008 which slashed three zeroes off the currency.
The national economy has contracted for three consecutive quarters, officially putting the country in recession, while a global crash in oil prices crimp revenue and contribute to fears of a potential default which could bring inflation levels even higher.