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ISLAMABAD: Sensitive Price Index (SPI)-based short-term inflation for the combined income group reached an all-time high of 47.23% year-over-year for the week ending April 19, according to data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) on Friday.
The year-on-year SPI has been steadily on the rise since August last year and remained mostly above 40pc. It rose to 42.31pc on Aug 18 last year, followed by 45.5pc on Sept 1 that year and 46.65pc during the week ending March 22 this year.
On a week-on-week basis, inflation was 0.51pc for the period under review, with food items getting costlier, particularly potatoes, tea, bread, chicken, LPG and petrol.
During the week under review, the prices of 29 items increased, eight decreased and 14 remained stable.
Out of the 51 monitored items, the average price of 29 items increased, 8 items decreased whereas 14 items registered no change during the week.
During the week under review, the items whose prices increased the most over the same week a year ago included wheat flour (143.88pc), gas charges for Q1 (108.38pc), tea Lipton (104.28pc), diesel (102.84pc), potatoes (98.74pc), bananas (98.42pc), eggs (97.80pc), petrol (87.81pc), rice basmati broken (87.30pc), rice Irri-6/9 (83.52pc), pulse moong (68.94pc), bread (59.22pc) and pulse mash (58.35pc).
The biggest change was observed in the prices of potatoes (3.79pc), tea Lipton (3.61pc), gur (3.40pc), bread (2.48pc), chicken (2pc), bananas (1.68pc), rice basmati broken (1.54pc) and rice Irri-6/9 (1.22pc), LPG (4.75pc), petrol (3.67pc) and matchbox (2.51pc).
The products whose prices saw the highest decline over the previous week were tomatoes (13.11pc), onions (4.62pc), garlic (3.59pc), sugar (1.52pc), wheat flour (0.93pc), mustard oil (0.56pc), cigarettes (0.26pc) and pulse gram (0.22pc).