CAIRO – 9 February 2023: Egypt’s annual core inflation rate recorded 31.2 percent in January 2023, compared to 24.4 percent in December 2022, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) said in a statement Thursday.
The Consumer Price Index in Egypt has recorded a monthly rate of 6.3 percent in January, compared to 0.8 percent for the same month last year, and to 2.6 percent in December 2022, the statement added.
Core inflation discounts or strips out certain categories that are considered more volatile.
The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) announced earlier Thursday that the annual urban inflation rate surged in January to 25.8 percent, compared to 21.3 percent in December.
This is the highest level of inflation recorded in Egypt since December 2017, when it recorded 21.9 percent, a month after the Central Bank of Egypt, led by its former president Tarek Amer, liberalized the exchange rate of the pound in November 2017.
According to the state-statistic body’s data, the annual inflation rate rose to 26.5 percent in January 2023, compared to 8 percent in the same month of prior year.
Egypt is witnessing an inflationary wave that has been accelerating almost every month since the beginning of 2022, as a result of the high costs of importing energy and food, due to the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, and the Corona epidemic crisis.
Egypt reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in November, worth $3 billion. It also devalued its currency twice, in March and late October, after an exit wave of hot money on the successor to the Ukraine crisis and the US interest rate hike on the dollar.
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