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Ghana's Consumer inflation holds at 17 pct in December 2014

Xinhua, January 14, 2015 Adjust font size:

Average prices of consumer goods stabilized in December of 2014 to hold headline inflation at 17.0 percent, same as was recorded for the previous month, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) said here on Wednesday.

The monthly change rate for the same month was 1.0 percent compared with 0.9 percent recorded in November 2014.

Baah Wadieh, deputy Government Statistician, told the media that inflation for the food group, with 44.91 percent share of the inflation basket, rose by 0.2 percentage points to 6.8 percent, relative to the 6.6 percent recorded for the same group the previous month.

"Non-food inflation, with 56.43 percent share of the inflation basket, on the other hand declined by 0.2 to 23.9 percent, compared with the 24.1 percent recorded for the previous month," Wadieh added.

According to Wadieh, the slight dip in the non-food inflation was mostly responsible for the stabilization of the inflation rate for the month of December.

Whereas the inflation rate for imported items in December 2014 was 23.4 percent, compared with a rate of 24.2 percent recorded in November 2014, inflation rate for locally produced items for December 2014 inched up to 14.5 percent compared with 14.4 percent recorded in November 2014.

"We have seen a base period effect influencing inflation trends in the Fourth Quarter of 2014 (Q4-2014), which was well supported by the stability of the cedi during the period and a tight monetary policy stance," Sampson Akigoh, Economist and Managing Director for InvestCorp, a local investment banking company, commented.

He added that it was quite interesting to see how this provided a buffer against demand pressures during the period under review. Endi