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Pakistan's inflation rate hits 4-year high

Islamabad - Pakistan's annual inflation rate expanded to 5.83 per cent in the month of July.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) has said that the Consumer Price Index-based inflation rate in Pakistan has surged to a four-year high in the month of July 2018.
The PBS, which is Pakistani government's official agency to record and release economic numbers, said on Wednesday that Pakistan's annual inflation rate expanded to 5.83 per cent in the month of July as against 5.21 percent a month ago and 2.9 per cent in July 2017. This is the highest inflation rate in Pakistan since September 2014, Xinhua reported.
The Bureau said that escalating prices of petroleum products and four rounds of the devaluation of Pakistani rupee were the main reasons behind the multi-year highest inflation rate in the country.
A report from Topline Securities, a brokerage house at the Pakistan Stock Exchange in the port southern city of Karachi, stated that the CPI-based inflation was expected to average around 7 per cent from the fiscal year of 2017-18 to the fiscal year of 2019-20.
On a monthly comparison, the CPI-based inflation in Pakistan hiked by 0.9 per cent in July 2018 as against an increase of 0.6 per cent in the previous month and a decrease of 0.3 per cent in July 2017.
Pakistan's core inflation, which is calculated by the non-food non-energy CPI surmounted by 7.6 per cent on a yearly basis in July this year when compared with an increase of 7.1 per cent in June this year and 5.6 per cent in July last year.