ISLAMABAD: The weekly inflation rate in Pakistan jumped to 42.27 percent on an annual basis last week. This is the highest weekly YoY number since September of last year. This happened as the cash-strapped country followed conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to restart a loan programme that had been put on hold.
According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) showed that weekly inflation rose by 1.37 percent up until March 9. Food prices rose the most.
The biggest weekly price increases were for tomatoes (12.43%), potatoes (11.37%), onions (9.26%), sugar (5.58%), bananas (5.31%), cooking oil (5 litre) (4.27%), wheat flour (4.06%), vegetable ghee (2.5 kg) (4.01%), fresh milk (1.82%), and broken basmati rice (1.24%).
On the other hand, the prices of chicken (6.73%), garlic (2.07%), pulse moong (0.83%), eggs (0.77%), pulse masoor (0.50%), LPG (0.26%), firewood (0.12%), and pulse gramme (0.05%) went down, according to a PBS report.
“During the week, the prices of 29 (56.86%) of the 51 items went up, eight (15.69%) went down, and 14 (27.45%) stayed the same.”
On an annual basis, the price of onions went up by 305.23%, the price of cigarettes went up by 165.86%, the price of diesel went up by 93.82%, the price of eggs went up by 78.63%, the price of rice Irri-6/9 went up by 78.14%, the price of petrol went up by 77.89%, the price of rice basmati broken went up by 77.27%, the price of bananas went up by 74.01%, the price of
