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Weekly Inflation Soars to All-Time High of 45.6%

Weekly inflation continued to rise due to the increase in food and energy prices, reaching an all-time high of 45.64 percent on a year-on-year (YoY) basis for the week ended on March 16, 2023, showed data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PSB) on Friday.

Before this, the highest ever year-on-year increase in weekly inflation, measured by PBS’s Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI), was 45.50 percent, recorded for the week ending on September 1, 2022.

The year-on-year trend posted an increase due to increase in the prices onions (233.89 percent), cigarettes (165.86 percent), gas charges for q1 (108.38 percent), diesel (102.84 percent), tea lipton (81.29 percent), petrol (81.17 percent), rice irri-6/9 (78.75 percent), rice basmati broken (78.10 percent), bananas (77.84 percent), eggs (72.19 percent), pulse moong (69.44 percent), wheat flour (56.27 percent) and bread (55.36 percent), while decrease is observed in the prices of tomatoes (21.87 percent) and chillies powdered (7.42 percent).

Week-on-week increase

The SPI for the week under review recorded an increase of 0.96 percent over the previous week. Major increase during the week was observed in the prices of food items, tomatoes (18.06 percent), tea lipton (9.26 percent), potatoes (4.52 percent), bananas (4.00 percent), sugar (2.70 percent), wheat flour (2.40 percent), cooking oil 5 litre (1.20 percent) and vegetable ghee 2.5 kg (1.16 percent), non-food items, lawn (5.77 percent), diesel (4.65 percent), shirting (2.80 percent) and petrol (1.84 percent).

On the other hand decrease was observed in the prices of onions (15.91 percent), chicken (5.97 percent), garlic (5.73 percent), pulse masoor (2.27 percent), eggs (2.26 percent), LPG (1.90 percent), vegetable ghee 1 kg (1.39 percent), pulse gram (1.24 percent), pulse mash (1.08 percent), pulse moong (0.84 percent) and mustard oil (0.64 percent).

The SPI is computed on weekly basis to assess the price movement of essential commodities at shorter interval of time so as to review the price situation in the country. SPI comprises of 51 essential items collected from 50 markets in 17 cities of the country.

During the week, out of 51 items, prices of 28 (54.90 percent) items increased, 11 (21.57 percent) items decreased and 12 (23.53 percent) items remained stable.

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