Ghana Inflation Quickens to 9.2% in February From Record Low

(Bloomberg) -- Ghana’s inflation rate edged up in February, remaining inside the central bank’s target band for an 11th consecutive month.

Consumer prices rose 9.2 percent from a year earlier, compared with the record-low rate of 9 percent in January, David Kombat, the acting government statistician at the Ghana Statistical Service, told reporters Wednesday in the capital, Accra. Prices rose 1 percent in the month.

Key Insights:

• The uptick in inflation will leave the central bank with little room to cut borrowing costs after the cedi declined more than 10 percent against the dollar this year.
• The central bank, which will announce its next policy decision on March 25, targets inflation in a range of 6 percent to 10 percent and Governor Ernest Addison has said it may be time to aim even lower.
• The statistics office still uses the old base year of 2012 and once it starts using the 2017 base for the index, that could change the inflation number.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ekow Dontoh in Accra at edontoh@bloomberg.net;Andre Janse van Vuuren in Accra at ajansevanvuu@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rene Vollgraaff at rvollgraaff@bloomberg.net, Andre Janse van Vuuren

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