ACCRA (Reuters) -Producer inflation in Ghana came in at 45.6% year on year in September from a revised 39.7% in August, the statistics service said on Wednesday, after a rebasing exercise assisted by the International Monetary Fund.
The West African country’s producer prices have accelerated steeply this year alongside a sharp pick-up in consumer inflation.
“We need to reflect the current structural changes we’re seeing in our economy, particularly the role of oil extraction, the penetration of ICT (information and communications technology) and … the expanding service sector,” government statistician Samuel Kobina Annim told a news conference, explaining why the rebasing was necessary.
Producer inflation figures were historically calculated in reference to 2006, but will now be calculated using prices from March 2020 to February 2021 weighted against 2019’s industrial output.
“It would have been problematic to use 2020 to 2021 as the sole base year, considering the obvious impacts of COVID-19, so we thought it best to measure 2020 prices against 2019 (output),” Annim said.
The Ghanaian cedi has plummeted more than 40% this year, straining importers of both raw and processed materials. Consumer inflation hit a new 21-year high of 37.2% in September on the back of soaring import costs.
The government is in the process of negotiating a support package from the IMF, which Annim said is helping the statistics office revise its methodology for calculating key economic indicators.
(Reporting by Christian Akorlie and Cooper InveenEditing by Sofia Christensen and Alexander Winning)
