Inflation in Colombia has dropped to 5.81% in September, as reported this Monday by the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) in a press conference. It represents a drop of 5.18 percentage points compared to the figure for the same month in 2023 (10.99%) and consolidates a trend that has been going on since April 2023, the month in which inflation began to decline after reaching a peak of 13 .34%. The new figure is the lowest for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) since December 2021, when it was 5.62%. It is close to the expectations of the Bank of the Republic of closing the year with a figure close to 5.5%.
The sectors with the most increases in the last year were ‘Education’ and ‘Restaurants and hotels’, which had increases of 10.76% and 9.08%, respectively. However, due to its greater weight in the economy, it was the ‘Accommodation, water, electricity and gas’ category that contributed the most to the annual variation. Its increase of 8.49% implies a contribution of 2.58 points to the inflation figure of 5.81%. In particular, accommodation is what pulls the category up once the breakdown is done. At the other extreme, the ‘Recreation and culture’ and ‘Information and communications’ sectors had decreases, with data of -0.01% and -0.76%, respectively.
Monthly variation
The monthly variation, meanwhile, has risen again after the unusual figure of 0.0% in August. In September, it was 0.24%—compared to 0.54% in the same month of 2023. As explained by the director of DANE, Piedad Urdinola, this is because food and non-alcoholic beverages no longer push the average downwards: in August they had implied a reduction of -0.13 percentage points, while this month they contributed 0.02. “Many subdivisions remain negative, such as potatoes, onions, blackberries, rice and cheese. However, they were not negative enough to compensate with [incrementos de] fresh fruits and cocoa,” said Urdinola.
Education, on the other hand, went from a monthly figure of -0.16% in August to an increase of 1.93% in the last month—from -0.01 contribution points to 0.08. This is because in September the variations in the prices of primary and secondary education using calendar B are captured. At the other extreme, there were negative numbers in ‘Recreation and culture’ (-0.26%), especially due to drops in movie and theater ticket prices.
The monthly data coincides with what was forecast in the survey of expectations of economic analysts prepared by the Bank of the Republic. The average of the projections was 0.27%, just three hundredths more than the DANE figure. The most optimistic estimate was 0.11%, while the most pessimistic was 0.57%.
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