Producer Price Inflation (PPI) for industry for the month of December 2014 declined by 3.4%. The PPI is now 34.2%.
The PPI rate measures the average change in the prices received by domestic producers for their production of goods and services.
[contextly_sidebar id=”lVtzB2cSo4cZiVfkr4dKgUOzKGuE6xq9″]The rate of inflation in the petroleum sector has seen some decrease from 61.1% to 30.9% in December due to the reduction in the ex-refinery price of petroleum products.
The Deputy Government Statistician at the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), Dr Baah Wadeah told Citi Business News, the plunge in the price of oil and gold has a huge impact on the PPI.
“Actually, the refine of coal, refined petroleum recorded a decrease in inflation rate from that of November to December 2014 as result of adjustment in the price of petroleum products on the world market and that actually affected the overall index that we computed and it’s also affected the index in the manufacturing sector which declined substantially to influence the entire index.”
The Deputy Government Statistician said the manufacturing sector contribute about two thirds of the overall index which means that when the index goes down, the whole index will greatly be affected.
The mining and quarrying sector in the report from the GSS however recorded the highest year-on-year producer price inflation rate of 43.3% followed by the manufacturing sub-sector recording 33.1%.
Dr Baah Wadeah again said the affect of gold contribute about 90% of the mining and quarrying sector and with the price going up the PPI also went up due to the margins from outside the country impacting hugely on the mining and quarrying sector as well
Meanwhile, the utilities group’s inflation declined marginally from 27.6percent to 27.5percent suggesting 0.1 percentage point decrease.
By: Norvan Acquah–Hayford/citifmonline.com/Ghana