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Consumer price index records drop in girls clothing

Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA’s) Acting General Statistician Liina Kafidi, reported a decline in girlsclothing prices.
According to the NSA, girls clothing prices have been fluctuating between (-2.1 and 2.2) %, due to back to school specials during the month of January.

Other prices that went down include those in the operation of personal transport equipment (petrol/diesel) category (-2.7 and 1.9) % and Newspaper, books and stationary (-1.7 and 1.8) %, with the decrease of prices in newspaper, books and stationary being mainly attributed to the back to school period and the personal transport equipment decrease which has been occurring over the past few months being attributed to declines in the price of crude oil.  The latest Namibia Consumer Price Index (NCPI) report, states that the annual basis Inflation rate for January 2015 decreased by 0.1 % points, a continuation of the downward trend in inflation which developed since July 2014. During the period January 2014 to January 2015, the inflation fluctuated between 6.1 and 4.5 %. The NSA also noted a decrease in the inflation rate for January 2015 as it fell from 4.6 to 4.5 % on an annual basis but however it increased from -0.2 to 0.8 % on a monthly basis.
“On a monthly basis, inflation was affected by increases in the prices of goods and services in all the groups comprising the NCPI with the exception of transport, clothing and footwear and recreation and culture which declined by 1.5, 0. 7 and 0.2 % respectively,” said Kafidi.
“The monthly inflation figures recorded a month earlier for these categories stood at 0.2 and -1.3 % while the recreation and culture sub component showed no change.   On an annual basis however, inflation was driven by prices in the categories of miscellaneous goods and services, recreation and culture and housing, and water. which expanded to 6.6, 4.9 and 3.6 % as compared to 3.1, 4.2 and 2.4 % registered during the same period last year.   The all items index increased to 110.6 up from 105.9 in January 2014,”she said.  The major drivers of the annual inflation were, mainly on account of relative importance in terms of weight of these categories in the overall inflation basket, alcoholic beverages and tobacco (7.5 %), food and non-alcoholic beverages (6.5 %) and transport (1.5 %). Additional relatively smaller contributions to inflation were recorded from the minor groups (by basket weighting), such as miscellaneous goods and services registering annual inflation rates of (6.6 %), recreation and culture (4.9 %) and education (4.4 %).

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