ABU DHABI: The Abu Dhabi Statistics Centre released the following January consumer price data for the Gulf Arab emirate on Monday, changing the base year for the data series to 2014 from 2007, which had the effect of lowering the inflation rate sharply.
The change in the base year reduced the weighting of housing and utilities in the consumer basket to 31.2 percent from 37.9 percent, among other changes.
This had the effect of lowering the inflation rate. In December, using the 2007 base year, consumer prices rose 0.4 percent month-on-month and 5.2 percent year-on-year, according to Reuters calculations. In January, prices of housing and utilities jumped 8.2 percent while food and beverage prices increased 1.1 percent, the statistics centre said.