(Bloomberg) -- Latin American countries will be in the vanguard of an inflation slowdown in emerging markets next year, with producer-price pressures in the region already “falling like a stone,” according to Oxford Economics.

“Global commodity price inflation is falling, and by mid-2023 we expect double-digit declines in annual import price inflation,” Gabriel Sterne, the firm’s head of global emerging markets research, wrote in a note published Tuesday. Latin America “will lead the way. Median annual import price inflation is already down to 6%.”

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Since Latin American countries generally don’t subsidize food as much as their EM peers, they’ll be first to feel the effects, Sterne wrote, predicting that it will take about two months for most of the import-price deceleration to filter through the economies.

The region containing Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa will find the price relief “most welcome,” Sterne wrote, given the proximity of Russia and Ukraine, and the fact food and fuel have a higher weight in consumer-price baskets compared with other regions. 

Emerging economies in Asia have the largest food subsidies, which means that they’ve been hit less hard by inflation when it was on the way up but will also be slower to see relief as commodity prices fall, Sterne wrote. Even so, the global drop “will nonetheless alleviate the risk of prolonged inflation.”

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