Ghana's April industry inflation increases to 6.4 pct

by Justice Lee Adoboe

ACCRA, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Relatively better global prices for gold and higher ex-factory prices for basic metals locally drove up annual industry inflation for April to 6.4 percent from 3.7 percent in March, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) said Wednesday.

The month-on-month inflation rate was 0.9 percent in April, up from -0.3 percent for the previous month.

The figures released show that of the three industry subsectors, mining and quarrying had the highest increase with 4.5 percentage points to 10.3 percent.

This is relative to the March figure of 5.8 percent, while manufacturing increased to 7.2 percent in April from 4.2 percent recorded in March.

"For mining and quarrying, it was due to marginal increases in gold prices on the world market. But it was more of base drift effect. Gold prices dipped in April 2017 and that affected the base for the calculation. So that partly accounted for what we are observing," Baah Wadieh, Acting Government Statistician, explained.

He added that the significant increases in the prices of the manufacture of basic metals and slight increases in the price of petroleum products plus the base-drift effect that resulted from April, last year contributed in the higher inflation for the manufacturing sub-sector.

If the current trend in all industry is sustained, analysts project economic growth for the basic commodity exporting country could be high again this year, following an 8.5-percent growth last year. Enditem