Price of sugar, rice goes down

ISLAMABAD: The prices of food items including sugar and rice went down during the week ending on September 9, as compared to the previous week, the Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) Friday revealed.

According to the data, the prices of food items that witnessed a decrease included bananas, prices of which decreased by 3.09 per cent whereas the price of rice (Irri-6/9) declined by 0.59pc on a Week-on-Week (WoW) basis.

Likewise, the prices of Moong pulse and sugar (refined) declined by 0.44pc and 0.28pc respectively. Among non-food items, the prices of LPG decreased by 2.59pc.

On a Year-on-Year basis, the prices of potatoes decreased by 26.32pc whereas that of Moong pulse and tomatoes declined by 25.24pc and 6.68pc respectively.

On the other hand, the food items that witnessed increase in prices on WoW basis included onions (23.35pc), tomatoes (20.38pc), chicken (7.67pc), wheat flour (4.97pc), eggs (3.83pc), pulse masoor (2.04pc), garlic & potatoes (1.34pc) each, vegetable ghee 1kg (1.32pc), washing soap (1.29pc), cooking oil 5 litre (1.22pc) and beef (1.11pc).

The year on year trend depicts increase of 13.64pc with most of the items increased, mainly, electricity for Q1 (46.55pc), LPG (45.76pc), vegetable ghee 1 Kg (40.71pc), chicken (38.55pc), vegetable ghee 2.5Kg (37.26pc), mustard Oil (36.74pc), cooking oil 5 litre (36.56pc), chili powder (35.71pc), gents sandal (33.37pc) and eggs (30.81pc),

It is pertinent to mention here that the overall SPI based weekly inflation for the week ended on September 9 recorded an increase of 1.37pc compared to the previous week.

The weekly SPI with base year 2015-16=100 is covering 17 urban centres and 51 essential items for all expenditure groups.

During the week, out of 51 items, prices of 24 (47.06pc) items increased, 05 (9.80pc) items decreased and 22 (43.14pc) items remained constant.

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