The year-on-year inflation rate fell to 9.9 per cent in January 2021 compared to 10.4 per cent in December, 2020, the Ghana Statistical Service said on Wednesday.

The rate is 0.5 percentage point lower than the rate for December.

The month-on-month inflation for December, 2020 to January, 2021 was 0.9 per cent, same rate as last month.

Professor Samuel Annim, the Government Statistician, said the overall month-on-month inflation of 0.9 per cent was just above the 2020 average of 0.8 per cent, but was considerably lower in Greater Accra at 0.2 per cent.

The Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages inflation was 12.8 per cent down from 14.1 per cent last month while the average Non-Food inflation was 7.7 per cent.

“With this rate, Food contributed 57.0 per cent to the total inflation. This is still above the average for the last year and a half, but slightly down from last month of 59.1 per cent,” Prof. Annim said.

Within the Food Division, Vegetables has 20.3 per cent making it the subclass with the highest rate of inflation, which is lower than last month rate of 24.2 per cent.

Housing, Water, Electricity and Gas stood at 19.0 per cent down from 20.1 per cent in December last month.

Overall, month-on-month Food inflation was 1.2 per cent with 0.3 percentage point lower than last month, but higher than the average over the last 12 months.

Compared to last December 2020, Fruits and Nuts had -5.1 per cent which saw a decrease in price levels, as did in Fish and Other Seafood of -0.2 per cent.

Similar to last month, Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco saw a relatively high month-on-month inflation rate of 1.4 per cent.

On regional basis, inflation was between 15.1 per cent in Greater Accra and 1.9 per cent in the Upper West Region.

By:Isaac Clottey