The Ghana Statistical Servicesays it expects the inflation rate to slow down in the coming months despite the recent spike.
Inflation rate jumped to 10.8 per cent for the month of April the highest since August 2019 after the rebasing exercise. This was due to the latest price increases attributed to the lockdown period. There are fears things could worsen going forward.
Speaking to JoyBusiness, Government statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim said, “Indeed last month which is April we recorded 10.6% inflation which was the highest since the August 2019 after the rebasing exercise. The rate that we announced last week was heavily impacted by the partial lockdowns and the sort of hedging that a lot of households and market women taking advantage brought about.
“We envision that the rate might slightly go down. We don’t foresee a situation where it is going to dip to 7.8% that we recorded in March 2020.”
He added, “So although we anticipate that things will normalize especially at a time that we are looking forward to hearing some possible ease down process to begin. We expect things to return to normalcy and therefore that panic buying that we did in the early month of April we don’t expect to see same moving forward.”
The national year-on-year inflation rate for April 2020 hits 10.6%, which is 2.8 percentage points higher than last month, the Ghana Statistical Service has said.
The year-on-year inflation for March 2020 was at 7.8 per cent. The Month-on-month inflation between March 2020 and April 2020 was 3.2%.
These are highest recorded year-on-year and month-on-month inflation rates since the CPI rebasing in August 2019.
Inflation rates for Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages was at 14.4% and Housing, Water, Electricity, and Gas at 11.2%.
Source: Joseph Appiah-Dolphyne
