BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera office of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) stated that the inflation rate in the region dropped to 2.5 percent in March this year compared to the 2.9 percent in the same period last year.
The PSA-CAR defined inflation as the average increase in the prices of goods and services in a certain area.
Among the provinces in the region, Ifugao posted the highest inflation rate in March this year at 6.8 percent followed by Apayao at 6.5 percent and Kalinga at 5.9 percent.
The PSA-CAR noted that most inflation rates of the provinces in March this year surpassed the March 2018 inflation rates, except for Benguet and Mountain Province.
Based on the data obtained from the PSA-CAR, Apayao posted the fastest price increases with 4.4 percentage points, followed by Ifugao with 4 percentage points and Kalinga with 2.6 percentage points.
By commodity group year-on-year, the PSA-CAR stated that inflation of the heavily weighted food and non-alcoholic beverages index in the region remains at 1.4 from February to march 2019 while alcoholic beverages and tobacco had the highest inflation in March this year among other commodities in the region with 16.5, followed by health with 8.4 percent.
On the other hand, the PSA-CAR pointed out that education incurred a negative inflation rate of 1.3 percent.
By food items year-on-year, the PSA-CAR revealed that only fish recorded the highest price increase this year and the previous year while prices of rice went down negative 3 percent this year.
The PSA-CAR explained that price index is a general measure of the change in the average retail prices of a market basket or collection of goods and services commonly purchased by the average Filipino households while inflation rate is the rate of change in the average price level between two periods, year-on-year or month-on-month, as measured by the CPI.
By Dexter A. See
