The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) expects inflation in August 2018 to decline year-over-year and there will be further deflation in comparison with July 2018, Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Dmytro Sologub said, citing preliminary estimates.

"We expect inflation in August, which means that the inflation rate year-over-year will be below 9% by the end of this month," he told reporters.

Sologub explained that the National Bank collects such preliminary data on a monthly basis with the help of web scrapping (collection of data from online sources using specially developed software), which tracks prices of commodities and services included in the consumer basket in retail online stores.

According to him, the array of online data collected by the NBU covers several retail online stores, which, in addition to online platforms, have a wide network of offline supermarkets in the five largest cities of the country (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa and Lviv). These supermarkets and their online stores offer a wide range of food, beverages, alcohol and tobacco products. The data array covers up to 46% of the Ukrainian consumer basket and includes more than 130 items of the consumer price index.

Data collected with the use of web scrapping, which began in 2015, coincides with official inflation statistics, he said.

Inflation in July 2018 from July 2017 slowed to 8.9% from 9.9% in June 2018 and 11.7% in May 2018, according to the State Statistics Service of Ukraine.

In August 2017, consumer prices in Ukraine were 0.1% down after a 0.2% rise in July 2017.