Weekly Inflation Soars to 30.6% Due to Increase in Food Prices

The weekly inflation, measured by the Sensitive Price Index (SPI), posted an increase of 30.60 percent for the combined income group on a year-on-year basis in the week ending on January 5, according to data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) on Friday. The year-on-year trend depicts an increase mainly due to increase in the prices of onions (501.23 percent), chicken (82.50 percent), tea lipton (65.41 percent), diesel (60.63 percent), eggs (50.51 percent), salt powdered (49.50 percent), petrol (48.21 percent), pulse moong (46.99 percent), rice basmati broken (46.17 percent), bananas (45.64 percent), wheat flour (45.35 percent) and rice irri-6/9 (43.11 percent), while decrease was observed in the prices of chillies powdered (22.98 percent), electricity for q1 (13.96 percent) and gur (1.11 percent). The SPI recorded an increase of 1.09 percent on a week-on-week basis. Major increase was observed in the prices of food items, chicken (16.09 percent), rice basmati broken (5.16 percent), wheat flour (4.87 percent), rice irri-6/9 (3.45 percent), bananas (2.97 percent), onions (2.65 percent), bread (1.24 percent), salt powdered (1.07 percent) and pulse moong (1.02 percent). A decrease was observed in the prices of potatoes (4.61 percent), eggs (1.31 percent), tomatoes (1.17 percent), LPG (0.85 percent), vegetable ghee 2.5 kg (0.71 percent), cooking oil 5 litre (0.32 percent), sugar (0.24 percent), vegetable ghee 1 kg (0.11 percent) and pulse masoor (0.05 percent). During the week, out of 51 items, prices of 23 (45.10 percent) items increased, 09 (17.65 percent) items decreased and 19 (37.25 percent) items remained stable. The Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) is computed on weekly basis to assess the price movement of essential commodities at shorter interval of time so as to review the price situation in the country. SPI comprises of 51 essential items collected from 50 markets in 17 cities of the country.