The national year-on-year inflation rate was 10.3% in February 2021. This is 0.4 percentage points higher than 9.9% recorded in January. This is according to the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released by Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) on 10th February 2021.
Meanwhile, month-on-month inflation between January and February 2021 was 0.8%, slightly lower than 0.9% in January. Among the sub-divisions, ‘Housing, Water, Electricity, Gas’ recorded an inflation rate of 23.4%, up from 19.0% last month. However, ‘Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages’ recorded a rate of 12.3%, down from 12.8% in January. These two divisions recorded the highest rates of inflation among the sub-divisions.
Regional Inflation
At the regional level, the overall year-on-year inflation ranged from 4.4% in the Volta Region to 14.8% in Greater Accra Region. It is only Greater Accra Region that recorded higher non-food inflation than food inflation. Food inflation was 11.6% whilst Non-Food inflation was 17.2%.
Meanwhile, The Eastern Region recorded the largest difference in Food and Non-Food inflation. The region recorded Food and Non-Food inflation rates of 14.5% and 2.4% respectively. Overall, year-on-year inflation went up in seven regions compared to last month.
Food Inflation
Overall, Food inflation was 12.3% was in February. This is lower than the 12.8% recorded in January. Nonetheless, it is just under the average of the previous 12 months of 12.6%. As a result, the contribution of Food inflation to total inflation decreased to 52.6%, this is the lowest contribution observed since September 2020.
However, month-on-month Food inflation was 0.0%, meaning that on average no Food inflation was observed between January and February 2021. Only, Restaurants and Accommodation Services saw an equally low month-on-month inflation rate of -0.6%. All other Divisions recorded positive month-on-month inflation.
Within the Food Division, Vegetables remain a Subclass with a high rate of inflation, but this is not as high as the previous month. The vegetable sub-class recorded an inflation rate of 17.4% in February compared with 20.3% recorded in January.
However, Vegetables recorded negative month-on-month inflation of -1.4%. Fish & Seafood and Fruits & Nuts saw similar negative inflation rates of -1.4% and -1.3% respectively.
Non-Food Inflation
In contrast to Food inflation, Non-Food year-on-year inflation on average went up to 8.8% in February compared to 7.7% in January. Out of the 13 Divisions, five had higher year-on-year inflation in February 2021 than the rolling average over the last 12 months. Especially, Housing recorded a high rate of inflation of 23.4% in February 2021.
Greater Accra recorded a high rate of month-on-month inflation for Housing. The GSS attributed this high rate to an increase in rent prices. The average month-on-month Non-Food inflation was 1.4%. This is higher than the 0.7% recorded in January 2021.
On a month-on-month basis, Upper West Region recorded the highest overall inflation of 1.8% whilst the Upper East Region had the lowest rate of -0.6%. In Ashanti, higher rates of inflation were recorded for 12 out of 13 in the period January to February 2021 as compared to the same period in 2020. Especially, Insurance and Financial Services saw high inflation in Ashanti between January and February 2021.
Imported and Local Inflation
The inflation of imported goods was 6.7%, up from 6.1% last month. On the other hand, the inflation of local goods was 11.7% on average, up from 11.3% in January. Meanwhile, month-on-month inflation for imported goods was 1.0% as compared to 0.7% for locally produced goods.
