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Prices of essential food items, including tomatoes and onions, continued to be a major factor as weekly inflation measured by the Sensitive Price Index (SPI) clocked in at 30.6 per cent year-on-year (YoY) for the week ending on January 5, data shared by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) showed on Friday.
Last week, YoY inflation was measured at 29.3pc.
Data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) on Friday showed inflation rose 1.09pc week-on-week. It had fallen slightly by 0.09pc in the previous week.
The SPI monitors the prices of 51 essential items based on a survey of 50 markets in 17 cities across the country. During the week under review, the prices of 23 items increased and nine decreased while 19 remained unchanged.
Vegetable prices have soared across the country in the aftermath of the devastating monsoon floods this year. To combat rising prices, the government had exempted sales tax and withholding tax on the import of tomatoes and onions for a period of four months starting in September.
Pakistan has been in the grips of high inflation in the past few months. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which had spiked to a decades-high level of 27.2pc in August and slowed slightly in the following months, rose again to 24.5pc in December.