Towards the end of 2021, governments across Europe had scarcely eased their COVID-19 restrictions when the continent was gripped by a new problem: a cost-of-living crisis caused by soaring prices and low wage growth over the past decade.
From 2022, the war in Ukraine threw global supply chains into further disarray, leading to surging inflation. In January this year, consumer prices in the United Kingdom rose by 10.1 percent and across the eurozone by 8.5 percent.
