Zimbabwe stopped publishing official inflation statistics in mid-2008, at the worst of the crisis, so every subsequent figure is a reconstruction. Independent estimates for the November 2008 peak range from tens of millions of percent to the often-cited 79.6 billion percent month-on-month (89.7 sextillion percent year-on-year) figure derived by Hanke and Kwok from private price data, itself contested on methodological grounds by other economists who reconstructed the series differently.
What would resolve this A recovered, complete run of contemporaneous retail price data for the peak months, independently reconstructed by more than one research team using the same methodology, would let economic historians agree on a single figure rather than a range spanning several orders of magnitude.
OpenMonetary economics, economic historyHyper Inflation in Zimbabwe