ISLAMABAD: Led by the historic gas price shock and some essential eatables, the short-term inflation measured by the Sensitive Price Index (SPI) went up by 42.6pc in the week ending Dec 21 on an annual basis.

This is the 6th week in a row that the weekly inflation index has stood above 41pc, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. However, on a week-on-week basis, the SPI was down 0.5pc.

The SPI is computed every week to assess the price movement of essential commodities at shorter intervals of time to review the price situation in the country. SPI comprises 51 essential items collected from 50 markets in 17 cities of the country.

“The year-on-year trend depicts an increase of 42.60pc in SPI,” said the PBS which attributed the spike to an unprecedented 1,109pc increase in gas rates besides unavoidable kitchen items like wheat, rice, chillies, tomatoes, sugar etc.

It said the prices of cigarettes increased by 93.22pc during the week ending Dec 21 while chilli powder became expensive by almost 82pc year-on-year.

Likewise, the price of wheat flour jumped by 78.8pc followed by 72.5pc of garlic, 62.5pc of broken rice basmati and 59.45pc in rice IRRI-6 and 9.

These price increases were followed by gents sponge chappal 58.05pc, tomatoes (56.89pc), Gents Sandal (53.37pc), Sugar (50.33pc) and Gur (49.86pc).

On the other hand, the decrease was also observed in the prices of onions (23.92pc), mustard oil (4.24pc), vegetable ghee 1 kg (1.59pc), vegetable Ghee 2.5 kg (0.62pc) and bananas (0.06pc) on an annualised basis.

However, the SPI for the week ending Dec 21 eased slightly by 0.51pc when compared to the preceding week that ended on Dec 14. A decrease was observed in the prices of potatoes (13.17pc), petrol super (4.97pc), diesel (4.68pc), tomatoes (3.45pc), sugar (1.16pc), wheat flour bag (0.33pc), chicken (0.13pc), rice Basmati broken (0.11pc) and cooking oil 5-litre (0.07pc).

On the other hand, a major increase during the week was observed in the prices of eggs (10.42pc), firewood whole (1.23pc), onions (1.19pc), pulse moong (0.88pc), pulse gram (0.79pc), garlic and rice IRRI-6/9 (0.40pc) each, pulse masoor (0.30pc), LPG (0.26pc), bananas (0.19pc), shirting (0.15pc) and georgette (0.13pc).

The PBS said that during the week under review, out of 51 items, prices of 18 (35.29pc) items increased while that of nine items (17.65pc) decreased and 24 (47.06pc) items remained stable.

On an annual basis, the SPI inflation hit a record 48.35pc in early May but then decelerated to as low as 24.4pc in late August before surging past 40pc during the week ending on Nov 16 and remained above that level since then.

Published in Dawn, December 23rd, 2023