By Anusha Ondaatjie
July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Sri Lanka’s inflation may slow in July for a fifth straight month as cheaper liquefied petroleum gas pushed utility costs lower, according to the chief of the prices division in the statistics department.
“Point-to-point inflation could decline after gas prices came down,” D.C.A. Gunawardena, director at the Department of Census and Statistics, said by telephone from Colombo today. “Sugar and lentil prices have also stabilized and there wasn’t much variation in vegetable and fish prices.”
Consumer prices in the capital, Colombo, climbed 4.8 percent in June from a year earlier after gaining 5.3 percent in May. The rate has dropped to less than half the average of the five years through 2009, helped by expanded cultivation on lands recovered from the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels. The statistics office will release this month’s inflation figures on July 30.
The Central Bank of Sri Lanka on July 9 reduced the reverse repurchase and repurchase rates by a quarter point to 9.5 percent and 7.25 percent, respectively, to support economic growth after the end of the island’s civil war.
The monetary authority said July 9 that inflation will remain “subdued” and at single-digit levels for the remainder of the year. Sri Lankan gas retailers, including the local unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, cut prices by as much as 7 percent on July 1 because of cheaper input costs.
To contact the reporter on this story: Anusha Ondaatjie in Colombo at anushao@bloomberg.net
source - http://noir.bloomberg.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment