The price index for producers in February slumped to 5.5 percent.
This represents a 2.2 percentage point fall of producer inflation relative to the rate recorded in January, 2018 of 7.7 percent.
The producer inflation index measures the average change overtime in the prices received by domestic producers for the production of their goods and services.
The Acting Government Statistician, Baah Wadieh indicated that this decrease in the all industry rate is as a result of decreases in the inflation rate of manufacturing sector and mining and quarry sub-sectors.
The PPI for the mining and quarry sub-sector decreased by 9.1 percentage points over the January rate of 18.3 percent to record 9.2 percent in February.
Wadieh mentioned that, rates recorded for the Mining and Quarry was due to a base drift effect.
This emanated from increases in gold prices in 2017, affecting the entire index of the group.
The sub-sector recorded the highest rate of 0.5 percent.
For the manufacturing sub-sector, producer inflation decreased by 1.3 percentage points, recording 6.0 percent.
This sub-sector constitutes more than two-thirds of total industry.
Wadieh again attributed the main cause of decrease in the manufacturing sub-sector to a base drift effect.
“What happened was that, the PPI for the manufacture of coke, refined petroleum products, among others dropped from 29.0 percent in January to 22.8 percent in February,” he said.
During the month, six out of the sixteen major groups in the manufacturing sub-sector recorded inflation rates higher than the sector average of 6.0 percent.
Manufacture of machinery and equipment recorded the highest inflation rate of 26.1 percent, while manufacturing of food products and beverages recorded the lowest rate of -3.3 percent.
The utilities sub-sector recorded no inflation during the month, indicating a decrease of 0.2 percentage point relative to the rate recorded in January, 2018.
By Joshua W. Amlanu
