Essential goods remain out of reach as Pakistan’s annual short-term inflation stays above 40 percent

ISLAMABAD: The prices of essential commodities continued to stay away from the reach of the financially vulnerable segments this week, with data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics showing the annual short-term inflation well above 40 percent on Friday.
The government computes the Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) on a weekly basis to evaluate the price fluctuation of necessary commodities by evaluating the rates of 51 items collected from 50 markets in 17 cities of the country.
The SPI report for the week ending on January 4 reflected an increase in the rates of 19 commodities, decrease in nine and stability in 23.
“The SPI for the current week ended on 04th January, 2024 increased by 0.81 percent,” the PBS said in its report. “Major increase is observed in the prices of Tomatoes (16.04 percent), Chicken (13.98 percent), Eggs (3.20 percent), Onions (3.04 percent), Bananas (2.13 percent), Pulse Gram (2.12 percent), Sugar (2.04 percent), Pulse Moong (1.68 percent), LPG (1.19 percent), Firewood (0.51 percent) and Georgette (0.23 percent).”
“The year on year trend depicts increase of 42.86 percent,” it added.
Pakistan’s rapidly depreciating national currency and its rising energy imports led to significant inflation, prompting the central bank to retain the policy rate at 22 percent last month to mitigate the situation.
The bank also informed in one of its recent reports to parliament it wanted to prevent high inflation from becoming entrenched in the coming months and hoped to bring it down to nearly 20 percent in the current fiscal year.