July Producer Price up 5.3%

A release from Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) indicates that inflation in prices of goods at production level went up to 39.35% for July 2008 from 37.37% for June. This represents an increase of5.3% with percentage points of 1.98 as measured by Producer Price Index (PPI).

This implies that ex-factory prices for all industry, including manufacturing, mining and quarrying and utilities sub sectors were on average 39.35% higher in July 2008 than they were in July 2007. The rate of inflation for these sub sectors were: mining and quarrying, 59.48%; manufacturing, 33.94%; and utilities, 44.47%.

Producer price inflation in July 2008 increased for mining and quarrying by 11.94 percentage points, while manufacturing and utilities inched up by 0.55 and 0.15 percentage points respectively, for July 2008 than June 2008.

In the manufacturing sub-sector, 13 out of 16 of the major groupings showed appreciable increases of at least 10%, in their index level, ranging from 14.81 % (manufacture of other non-metallic mineral products) to 103.81% (manufacture of machinery and equipments.

The monthly change in all industry PPI for July 2008 was 2.37%. The corresponding changes for the major sub-sectors were: mining and quarrying, 7.94%; manufacturing, 1.41%; and utilities, 0.14%.

The year-on-year inflation from the producer's perspective for all industry and manufacturing has been rising steadily over the ten-month period. Between October 2007 and November 2007 producer prices in the utilities and mining and quarrying rose sharply.