By Shadrach Aziz Kamara
Statistics Sierra Leone (Stats-SL) has on Wednesday 18th August 2021 held their monthly Press Conference on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for July 2021 at their Headquarter in Freetown.
In a power point presentation, the Deputy Statistician General Andrew Bob Johnny defined Inflation as the measure of the average over time in prices paid by largely urban consumer for a market basket of consumer goods and services, adding that they are using the modified lapsers formula to compute indices according to the Classification of Individual Consumption by purpose (COICOP) with 12 functions and they’re constantly having technical support from the World Bank, IMF and ECOWAS.
He maintained that prices are collected from 436 items identified in 2008 (base-year/reference year) adding that basket can only be more appropriately be changed after a living standard survey, adding that prices collected are the prevailing weekly market outlets is 64 items and three times in a week that is Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. He continued to say that other specific outlets for monthly or quarterly items whose prices are less likely to fluctuate rapidly such as electricity, water supply and mobile. He disclosed that the key finding of July 2021 CPI show that annual national inflation (Year-on-year) stood at 10.15 percent up by 0.30 percentage point from 10.20 percent in June 2021 and the monthly inflation is 1.53 percent up by 0.88 percentage point from 0.65 percent in June 2021.
In his presentation the Director of NAESD Mwaluma Andrew Bryma Gegbeh said that the food and non-alcoholic beverages declined by 1.72 percentage points from 17.12 percent in June 2021 to 15.40 percent in July 2021. He continued that alcoholic beverages, tobacco and narcotics increased from 12.18 percent in June 2021 to 19.52 percent in July 2021, adding that the inflation increased by 7.34 percentage points Year-on-year. He maintained that clothing and footwear declined by 0.07 percentage point from 5.92 percent in June 2021 to 5.85 percent in July 2021, adding that housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels increased from 8.37 percent in June 2021 to 8.75 percent in July 2021. He went on to say that the inflation rate increased from 8.37 percent in June 2021 to 8.75 percent in July 2021, adding the inflation rate increased by 0.38 percentage point Year-on-year.
