LONDON: Tanzanian inflation eased in February as food prices rose more slowly, the statistics office said on Tuesday. The National Bureau of Statistics said inflation fell to 5.6 percent year-on-year last month from 6.5 percent in January. Month on month, the headline inflation rate remained unchanged in February at 0.7 percent.
“The decline of the annual inflation rate for February was caused by slower rises in the prices of both food and non-food items,” Ephraim Kwesigabo, a director at National Bureau of Statistics, told a news conference. The inflation rate for food and non-alcoholic beverages decreased to 9.5 percent from 10.7 percent in January, he said.
Last month, Tanzania changed the formula for calculating its annual headline inflation rate by reducing the weight of food in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation.