Eastern Visayas inflation rate drops to 5.9% in July ‘18

TACLOBAN CITY — The inflation rate (IR) in Eastern Visayas declined to 5.9 percent in July after posting the record-high 6.3 percent in June, the Philippine Statistics Authority-Regional Statistical Service Office 8 (PSA-RSSO 8) reported.

Wilma A. Perante, PSA-RSSO 8 regional director, told the Manila Bulletin that the July 2018 injflarion rate is 0.4 percentage points lower than the 6.3 percent rate a month ago, but 2.7 percentage points higher than the 3.2 percent rate in July last year.

“The regional inflation rate was 0.2 percentage point higher than the 5.7 percent national average in July,” Perante said.

Perante said four provinces in the region – Biliran, Leyte, Northern Samar and Samar, posted lower inflation rates in July.

Increases, however, were recorded in Eastern Samar (0.3) and Southern Leyte (0.1).

Eastern Samar registered the highest inflation rate at 7.8 percent, while Southern Leyte posted the lowest inflation rate at 1.5 percent.

Perante pointed out that by major commodity groups, education recorded the highest decrease of a hefty 19.7 percentage points, from 3.5 percent in June to -16.2 percent in July.

It posted the lowest and the only commodity with negative inflation among all commodity groups.

This may be attributed to the implementation of the free tuition law among state universities and colleges.

“Annual price changes in alcoholic beverages and tobacco slowed down by 0.4 percentage points from its previous month’s rate, but still recorded a double digit inflation rate of 21.6 percent, the highest among all commodities,” Perante said.

She added that the heavily weighted Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages went up by 0.3 percentage points, from 7.9 percent in June to 8.2 percent during the reference month.

This can be attributed to faster price increases of rice, corn, fish, vegetables, and sugar, jam, honey, chocolate and confectionery products.

Fish remained to have a double digit inflation at 18.5 percent, the highest among all food items.