Weekly Inflation Jumps Over 34% from Last Year

The Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) based inflation for the week ended February 2, 2023, recorded an increase of 2.82 due to increase in the prices of food and non-food items, says the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS). The year-on-year trend depicts an increase of 34.49 percent mainly due to an increase in the prices of onions (556.36 percent), chicken (90.88 percent), eggs (81.69 percent), diesel (81.41 percent), petrol (68.77 percent), tea lipton (63.92 percent), rice basmati broken (63.44 percent), rice irri-6/9 (62.36 percent), pulse moong (61.11 percent), bananas (57.38 percent), pulse gram (53.18 percent), bread (48.80 percent), wheat flour (48.35 percent), salt powdered (48.14 percent), pulse mash (46.17 percent), LPG (43.76 percent), mustard oil (42.09 percent) and washing soap (41.96 percent), while decrease is observed in the prices of tomatoes (61.98 percent), chillies powdered (15.32 percent), electricity for q1. During the week, out of 51 items, prices of 32 (62.75 percent) items increased, 01 (1.96 percent) items decreased and 18 (35.29 percent) items remained stable. The items, which recorded increase in their average prices during the week over previous include LPG (17.61 percent), garlic (17.07 percent), petrol super (16.22 percent), hi-speed diesel (15.30 percent), pulse gram (7.10 percent), bananas (4.75 percent), chicken (4.37 percent), pulse mash (3.93 percent), pulse masoor (3.91 percent), mustard oil (3.47 percent), eggs (3.42 percent), rice irri-6/9 (3.38 percent), and pulse moong (2.33 percent). There was also an increase in average prices of sugar (2.32 percent), vegetable ghee dalda/habib or other superior quality 1 kg pouch each (2.13 percent), rice basmati broken (2.12 percent), energy saver (1.67 percent0, bread plain (1.55 percent), tea prepared (1.43 percent), vegetable ghee dalda/habib 2.5 kg tin each (1.10 percent), cooked daal (1.08 percent), cooking oil dalda or other similar brand (sn), 5 litre tin each (0.87 percent), powdered milk nido 390 gm polybag each (0.84 percent), gur (0.62 percent), cigarettes capstan 20’s packet each (0.48 percent), milk fresh (0.35 percent), firewood whole 40 kg (0.30 percent), sufi washing soap (0.23 percent), curd (0.23 percent), tomatoes (0.16 percent), onions (0.09 percent) and wheat flour bag 20 kg (0.04 percent).