Oman registered a year-on-year consumer inflation of 1.79% in January 2017, riding primarily on a 9.02% rise in prices of products and services in the transport set, and aided by a 2.01% upward price revision in the housing, water, electricity, gas and fuels set.
According to the latest data released by the (NCSI) — the Sultanate's premier statistical agency, inflation was contained by a price decline of 2.05% among foods and non-alcoholic beverages, and also falling prices across clothing and footwear (0.71%), health (0.13%) and communication (3.02%). Tobacco prices went up nearly 22%, while furnishings, household equipment & maintenance turned costlier by 1.37%, along with a 2.85% price hike in the education set. Recreation and culture, and restaurants and hotels recorded a price increase of 0.44% and 0.39% respectively in January compared with the same month of 2016. Miscellaneous goods and services costs rose by 1.88%, the NCSI report shows.
In the food segment, price of meat escalated by 0.37%, followed by a price rise of 0.37% and 0.64% in sugar, jam, honey and confectionary; and non-alcoholic beverages, respectively. However, bread and cereals; fish and seafood; and milk, cheese and eggs logged a price fall of 1.3%, 0.51% and 2.55% respectively. Oils and fats declined by 0.26%, even as fruits and vegetables fell by 4.15% and 11.11% in the same order. Other food products saw prices going up by 0.55%. Monthly inflation in January stood at 0.75%, compared with prices for December 2016.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ