The Producer Price Inflation (PPI) for all industry in February 2017 inched up from the 3.1 percent recorded in January 2017 to 5.4% in February 2017.
The rate is 2.3 percentage points higher than the rate recorded in January 2017.
Meanwhile the monthly change rate for the year-on-year inflation from the producer’s perspective for all industry for February 2017 was 2.2%.
The PPI measures the average change over time in the prices received by domestic producers for the production of their goods and services and in Ghana the PPI reports the producer price indices with reference to September 2006 as the base period.
The producer inflation rate for the Mining and quarrying increased by 19.7% points in February 2017 being the highest year-on-year producer price inflation followed by the Manufacturing sub-sector which recorded 3.5%. Meanwhile with the Utilities sector, the rate for February 2017 was 1.3% the lowest record on year-on-year.
Speaking to the media, the acting government statistician Baah Wadieh who presented the release said, the increase was as result of increases in the inflation of all the sub-sectors.
“The increase in the manufacturing was as result of the increase in petroleum prices in February 2017, we observe also that for utilities it was mainly as a result of a base drift effect. In February 2016, there was some slight reduction in utility tariffs and that affected the base index when you compare to same period in 2017. But there was a slight variation in tariff due to exchange rate effect and other things.”
“Also, mining and quarrying also went up and the increase is as a result of increase in the price of gold in February 2017 and that also affected the index. Therefore, these three sectors all reported increases which affected and contributed heavily in we seeing the increase of the PPI to the 5.4% that we see.”
But regarding the monthly changes Mining and Quarrying sub-sector recorded the highest year-on-year producer price inflation rate of 8.9%, followed by the Manufacturing sub-sector with 1.3 percent.
The Utilities sub-sector recorded again the lowest rate of 0.2 percent.