ISLAMABAD: The short-term inflation, based on the Sensitive Price Index (SPI), eased slightly but remained elevated at 45.72 per cent for the week ending on May 18, showed the official data released on Friday.

The weekly inflation stayed above 48pc for the previous two weeks due to high prices of transport, veg­e­tables, wheat flour, meat, pulses and sugar. The slight decrease was cau­sed by a cut in petroleum product prices three days before the data collection.

However, on a week-on-week basis, it posted a drop of 0.16pc.

The SPI has been going up since Ramazan mainly due to a weaker rupee, expensive petrol and electricity and a higher rate of sales tax.

Of the 51 items in the SPI basket, prices of 23 goods soared, 13 dropped and 15 remained unchanged compared to the previous week.

The items whose prices increased the most over the same week a year ago were: cigarettes (138.50pc), tea Lipton (114.93pc), potatoes (114.69pc), gas charges for Q1 (108.38pc), bananas (104.44pc), gents sponge chappal (100.33pc), flour (90.77pc), rice basmati broken (86.30pc), eggs (85.86pc), rice irri-6/9 (80.44pc), petrol (79.85pc), diesel (78.68pc), pulse moong (66.79pc), bread (63.17pc).

On a week-on-week basis, the biggest rise was observed in the prices of chicken (7.51pc), tea Lip­ton (4.53pc), gur (2.79pc), eggs (2.29pc), energy saver (2.22pc), tomatoes (2.11pc), tea prepared (1.09pc) and curd (1.08pc).

A decrease was also obs­erved on week-on-week in pri­ces of onions by (9.04pc), garlic (1.76pc), sugar (1.42pc), wheat flour (1.40pc), vegetable ghee 2.5kg (0.63pc), mustard oil (0.48pc), pulse masoor (0.40pc), pulse gram (0.12pc), diesel (10.38pc), petrol (4.24pc), LPG (3.02pc) and firewood (0.89pc).

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2023