Pakistan’s weekly inflation surged by a whopping 41.54 percent on a year-on-year basis, data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics revealed.
The rise was witnessed mainly due to a sharp increase in the prices of essential commodities including bread, onions, fuel, gas, vegetables, rice, etc. during the week ending on Feb. 23 as compared to the corresponding time last year, the bureau said in a statement on Friday.
The Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) showed that the increase in the price of certain commodities ranged between about 50 percent to 372 percent during the last year.
The SPI on a week-on-week basis recorded an increase of 2.78 percent with a major increase observed in the prices of food items, the statement said, adding that the prices of the non-food items increased sharply, especially a flare-up in the price of gas charge with 108.38 percent.
The increase was also an outcome of the new taxation imposed by the government earlier this week to meet the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for unlocking a 1.1 billion U.S. dollars tranche. ■
