Inflation for December 2020 is 10.4 percent

The inflation for the month of December 2020 was 10.4% which is 0.6 percentage point higher than last month the Ghana Statistical Service has announced.

Month-on-month inflation between November 2020 and December 2020 was 0.9%.

Again like previous months, just two of the 13 Divisions had higher than average inflation rates; ’Housing, Water, Electricity, Gas’ (20.1% down from 21.0% last month) and ‘Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages’ (14.1% up from 11.7% last month).

Regional Inflation

At the regional level, the overall year-on-year inflation ranged from 2.1% in the Upper West Region to 16.3% in Greater Accra Region.

With the exception of Upper West Region (-0.4% food inflation and 4.6% non-food inflation), all regions recorded higher food inflation than non-food inflation.

Compared to last month, only Ashanti, Brong Ahafo and Upper West Region had lower food inflation this month.

The biggest difference was recorded in Central Region (3.5% to 12.8%). As shown in Figure 5, on a month-on-month basis Nothern Region recorded the highest overall inflation (1.7%) and Food inflation (3.1%).

Food and Non-Food Inflation

Food contributed 59.1% to the total inflation.

This is the highest contribution recorded since April 2020 when COVID-19 started to affect Ghana.

The increased rate of food inflation is the predominant reason for increased overall inflation, as without this increase, year-on-year inflation would have been lower than last month.

Within the Food Division, Vegetables (24.2%) was the Subclass with the highest rate of inflation, followed by Fish and other Seafood (22.9%).

Overall month-on-month Food inflation was 1.5% (1.2 percentage point higher than last month and higher than both on average in 2020 and in the same month last year).

Similar to Food, Alcoholic Beverages and Tabacco saw a relatively high month-on-month inflation (0.9%).

In contrast to Food inflation, Non-Food inflation decreased, from to 7.7% this month as compared to 8.3% last month and 8.5% on average in 2020.

Month-on-month Non-Food inflation was 0.4%.

After a few months of high inflation for Transport, December saw low inflation for Transport (4.8% year-on-year and 0.1% month-on-month as compared to an average 7.8% year-on-year and 0.4% month-on-month for 2020)

Compared to both the average month-on-month inflation for different Divisions in the regions on average over the year 2020 and to the same month-on-month inflation indicators for December 2019, December 2020 recorded comparatively high inflation numbers.

Imported and Local Inflation

The inflation of imported goods was 6.1% (up from 5.6% last month), while the inflation of local goods was 12.1% on average (up from 11.5% last month).

Month-on-month inflation for imported goods was 0.3% and for locally produced goods 1.1%.

On average in 2020, year-on-year inflation for imported goods was 11.8%, which is more than double the average year-on-year inflation in 2020 for imported goods (5.3%).

Especially in the second half of 2020, local goods recorded higher rates of inflation than imported goods.