Major indicators of inflation witness decline: Omar Hamid Khan

ISLAMABAD: Spokesperson for the Finance Division Omar Hamid Khan on Tuesday said major Indicators of inflation for instance Consumer Price Index (CPI), Sensitive Price Index (SPI) and Wholesale Price Index (WPI) witnessed a decline by 0.3 percent, 2.0 percent and 0.3 percent respectively in December 2019 over November 2019.

Food Inflation declined to -1.7% Month on Month (MoM) for urban and -1.1% for rural consumers.

“The MoM inflation augurs well for future inflation trajectory for the current fiscal year. The government’s measures to curb inflation have started to show results. We anticipate the prices to come down further in 2020,” Omar Hamid Khan said.

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The major decline in Month on Month has been witnessed in the prices of tomatoes (36.5%), turnip (20.6%), radish (22.4%), onion (12.5%), peas (18.0%), chillies (17.6%), carrot (16.9%), chicken (11.2%), spinach (11.0%), ginger (8.6%), lemon (3.9%), potato (2.0%), cucumber (2.9%) and wheat flour (1.1%).

The government is taking aggressive measures to control prices of essential commodities by eliminating major contributory factors to the price increase, the spokesman said.

In first week of December 2018, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) had reported that the Inflation had increased to 12.7 percent year-on-year, the highest level recorded in nine years mainly due to an increase in prices of food items.

Inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), had edged up by 1.3pc over October after the PBS revised its calculation methodology by setting the new base year 2015-16 instead of the previous 2007-08 financial year.

The Finance Ministry had claimed in a brief statement that inflation would decrease from December without saying how.