Producer Price Inflation (PPI) for the month of February 2018 has dropped to 5.5% which represents a 2.2% reduction compared to the 7.7% recorded in January this year.
The month-on-month change in producer price index between January 2018 and February 2018 was 0.1%.
Under the same period, the Mining and Quarrying sub-sector recorded the highest year-on-year producer price inflation rate of 9.2%, followed by the Manufacturing sub-sector with 6.0%.
Meanwhile the Utilities sub-sector recorded no year-on-year producer inflation but with respect to the monthly changes, Mining and quarrying recorded the highest rate of 0.5%.
Speaking to the press in Accra, Acting Government Statistician, Baah Wadieh said the decrease has been influenced by the decrease in inflation of the Manufacturing and are Mining and Quarrying sub-sectors.
“The decrease in inflation is as a result in the decrease of the inflation rate in the Manufacturing sector and the Mining and Quarrying sub-sectors; so these drops in inflation for manufacturing and the drop in inflation for the Mining and Quarrying sub-sectors has accounted for the new rate”.
Mr Baah Wadieh explained that a decrease in the inflation of the manufacturing sector has the potential to trigger a decrease in the Producer Price Inflation.
“We know that manufacturing has about two thirds of the weight of the entire basket that we are looking at so any drop-in manufacturing can greatly affect the we can term as the average for the entire industry”.
PPI measures the average change over time in prices received by domestic producers for their goods and services as Ghana reports the producer price indices with reference to September 2006, which is the base year.
The producer price inflation in the Mining and Quarrying sub-sector decreased by 9.1% points over the January 2018 rate of 18.3% to record 9.2% in February 2018.
