Inflation drops to lowest in four years

Inflation rate for March has declined to 12.8 per cent from the 13.2 per cent recorded in February.

This rate is the lowest since December, 2013. This means prices of goods and services were fairly stable during the review period. The year-on-year non-food inflation rate for March 2017 was 15.6 per cent compared with the 16.4 per cent recorded last month.

Announcing this, Acting Government Statistician Baah Wadieh attributed the recent figures to activities in the education sectors. “We are comparing prices in this year March to prices in 2016, and this is as a result of declines in the Education and Transport sectors. Prices fairly reduced.” The year-on-year non-food inflation rate is more than two times that of the food inflation rate of 7.3 per cent. February recorded 7.1 per cent.

In March 2017, the year-on-year inflation rate for imported items (15.5%) was 3.8 percentage points higher than that of locally produced items (11.7%).

Baah Wadieh added that the goodwill around the 2017 budget has contributed to this but cautioned that prices of goods are still going up. “Prices of goods and services came down. The rate at which the prices went up is slow. We should be mindful because prices can still go up,” he observed.