The Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, has indicated his outfit will focus more on the disaggregation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rather than the entire national inflation rate.

It is therefore encouraging policy makers to focus more on the disaggregation of inflation.

Speaking on PM Express Business Edition, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, said the disaggregation better helps the policy makers to strategise into the future. The disaggregation involves food and non-food inflation, imported and domestic inflation and the 13 key divisions.

“We want to move the narrative away from the national figures and really talk about the disaggregation because that is where we think would be more informative for policymakers to deal with. So anytime we release inflation on monthly basis, we do disaggregations at various levels. The first level is we talk about the food inflation and the non-food inflation, we talk about the inflation from the perspective of imported items and domestically produced items”.

“We go further to break down the items that we have into 13 divisions and give inflation figures for all the 13 divisions. The most important thing that we do is we look at the contribution of each of the 13 divisions to the overall inflation. At the 13 divisions level, we have divisions such as Transport; Housing, Water, Electricity and Gas; Food and Non-alcoholic Beverages; Education; Financial Services and Health.

Professor Annim apointed out that the rate of inflation of all these 13 divisions are provided to help shape policy making and business strategy.

“We give the inflation rate for all these 13 divisions, so for instance in November [2022], Housing, Water, Electricity and Gas recorded the highest inflation across the 13 divisions with an inflation figure of about 79%. What we are emphasising is, to what extent did it contributed to the 50.3% [national average]. That is where the issue of rate is important because if you look at the rates across the 13 divisions, food and non-alcoholic inflation alone accounts for 43.7%, whereas Housing, Water, Electricity and Gas account for about 10.8%. So if you factor in the issue of rate you would realise that the contribution of food and non-alcoholic to the 50.3% national rate that we recorded is higher”.

Regional inflation computed on disaggregation

Professor Annim also stressed that the Ghana Statistical Service has been computing the regional inflation based on disaggregation.

“We do the same for the regional disaggregation. Anytime we do inflation, we see inflation for all our 16 administrative regions. Everybody is talking about Eastern Region having the highest inflation; yes it is, but if you look at the contribution of Greater Accra and Ashanti regions, they have relatively higher weights.

“Greater Accra for instance has a weight of about 28%, so close to about a third of the overall inflation. Although it did not record the highest rate of inflation, its contribution to the overall inflation was about 47.9% and Eastern region that had the highest rate of inflation of about 63%, had a  contribution of just about 11% to the overall inflation.”

He concluded that “so the detail is in the disaggregation and that is where we want the policy makers to focus on”.