The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has announced that the inflation of imported goods was 6.1% in December 2020, up from 5.6% November same year.

The GSS added that while the inflation of local goods was 12.1% on average, up from 11.5% November.

“Month-on-month inflation for imported goods was 0.3% and for locally produced goods 1.1%. On average in 2020, year-on-year inflation for imported goods was 11.8%, which is more than double the average year-on-year inflation in 2020 for imported goods (5.3%). Especially in the second half of 2020, local goods recorded higher rates of inflation than imported goods,” the GSS said on Wednesday, January 13.

Regarding “Food contributed 59.1% to the total inflation in December 2020, The GSS said this is the highest contribution recorded since April 2020 when COVID-19 started to affect Ghana.

The increased rate of food inflation is the predominant reason for increased overall inflation, as, without this increase, year-on-year inflation would have been lower than last month.

Within the Food Division, Vegetables (24.2%) was the Subclass with the highest rate of inflation, followed by Fish and other Seafood (22.9%).

Overall month-on-month Food inflation was 1.5% (1.2 percentage point higher than last month and higher than both on average in 2020 and in the same month last year).

Similar to Food, Alcoholic Beverages and Tabacco saw a relatively high month-on-month inflation (0.9%). In contrast to Food inflation, Non-Food inflation decreased, from to 7.7% this month as compared to 8.3% last month and 8.5% on average in 2020. Month-on-month Non-Food inflation was 0.4%.

After a few months of high inflation for Transport, December saw low inflation for Transport (4.8% year-on-year and 0.1% month-on-month as compared to an average 7.8% year-on-year and 0.4% month-on-month for 2020)

Compared to both the average month-on-month inflation for different Divisions in the regions on average over the year 2020 and to the same month-on-month inflation indicators for December 2019, December 2020 recorded comparatively high inflation numbers.

The national inflation rate for December 2020 was 10.4 per cent.