Transport, health inflation decline

Inflation in food and non-alcoholic beverages, transport, clothing and footwear, health and communication, recorded a decrease in the annual inflation rate for the month of October.
According to the Namibia Statistics Agency’s latest CPI report, the annual inflation rate for October 2014 slowed to 5% from 5.3% recorded a month earlier and 4.9 % registered during the same period last year.
Inflation fluctuated between 6.1 and 4.4% in the period between October 2013 and October 2014, this fluctuation is largely on account of the fluctuation in global commodity prices, more food, and was aggravated by a weakening of the Namibia Dollar against major currencies.
The softening in price pressures over the year emanated mainly from food and non-alcoholic beverages, transport, clothing and footwear and communications which slowed to 7.5, 5.3, 3.8, 1.2 and -1.1% as compared to 8.4, 6.6, 4.1 and -1.0% as recorded in September 2014 respectively.
On a monthly basis, the inflation rate decelerated to 0.1% as compared to 0.2% in the previous month. These increases were a result from monthly increases recorded in all groups comprising the Namibia Consumer Price Index (NCPI).
The all items index for October 2014 stood at 109.7 as compared to 104.5 recorded in the same period last year. Over the past year, inflation has been driven predominantly by two categories of the overall inflation basket, namely transport and food and non-alcoholic beverages, while only one category has seen prices falls which is communications.
John Steytler of the NSA said the big driver of the annual inflation were mainly account of relatively large weighting of these categories in the overall inflation basket, food and non-alcoholic beverages (7.5%), alcoholic beverages and tobacco (7.1%), transport (5.3%), while additional relatively smaller contributions to inflation were recreation and culture which stood at 5.6%, hotels,cafes and restaurants at 6.3% and miscellaneous goods and services at 5%.

The monthly and annual inflation rates for Goods were estimated at 0.2 and 5.9% while that for Services stood at 0.0 and 3.8%, accordingly indicating that prices of Goods continue accelerating faster than those of Services.
Corresponding rates recorded during the same period last year stood at 0.7 and 6.7% and 0.0 and 2.5% respectively. For the month of October 2014 the index for Goods and Services stood at 112.3 and 106.2 respectively as compared to the corresponding indices of 106.1 and 102.4 recorded during the same period last year.
Namibian inflation is largely determined by four categories of the overall NCPI basket, namely housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels; food and non-alcoholic beverages, transport as well as alcoholic beverages and tobacco.