Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Annim, has highlighted the significant impact of ready-made food on food inflation.

He noted that in the food basket, ready-made food is among the top five items with the highest weight, consistently influencing the overall food inflation rate.

Speaking on JoyNews' AM show, Prof Annim said, “so these are the things we need to talk about when it comes to dis-aggregating the inflation figures away from the headline stories”.

Professor Samuel Annim explained that three key variables are used in computing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the rate of inflation: prices, quantities, and the weight of items in the basket.

He said this implies that items in the basket hold varying levels of importance to different segments of the population.

Professor Annim added that if there is a need to determine whether tomatoes are more significant in the market compared to onions and pepper, the weight assigned to these items in the basket can provide insights.

“For us to be able to get the weight, we have to do a Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) and that takes five years and at any point in time, you need to do it when you have a relatively stable economic period where you can use that to rebase your GDP”.