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The impact of inflation on private law relationships
45-72Views:209Not for decades have we seen price rises in Hungary, or in Europe and the world in general, such as those faced by the developed world in 2022. Inflation in Hungary was 24.5% in December 2022 and in January 2023, the indicator stood at 25.7%. This article provides a summary of the key concepts related to inflation, going beyond a definitional approach to inflation to cover its types and the most important principles and methods of measuring it. Economic foundations fundamentally determine private legal relations and legal institutions. In such a situation, crisis legislation is triggered, primarily in areas that have the greatest impact on the functioning of the economy and on consumers' daily lives. The present article reviews those important civil law structures and the rules governing them in the Civil Code and other statutory and governmental regulations, the content of which is justified to be amended in a persistent inflationary environment, but which have not been the focus of the legislator so far, emphasizing the need to adapt private law norms to the changed economic environment. The article examines those legal acts in which the legislator has set out in the text of the act data referring to value or price, nominally defining and quantifying in concrete terms the price or value that plays a significant role in a given private legal relationship. This type of legislation, however, does not take into account the changes in value relations at all, so that in an inflationary environment, the price and value figures nominally fixed in the private law norm are not adapted to economic processes, i.e. they are not in line with the current price level determined by economic fundamentals. The author outlines proposals and regulatory techniques for amending the law to adapt these legal provisions to the changed price and value conditions.