The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has announced that it has commenced works to rebase the Consumer Price Index(CPI) used to measure the country’s inflation from the current base year of 2012 to a new base year of 2017.
According to the service, the rebasing will also enable the restructuring of prime building cost index, which is used to calculate key items that go into the inflation basket.
Speaking at the celebration of the African Statistics Day, Acting Government Statistician, Mr. Baah Wadieh disclosed that codebooks for the basket of 400 proposed items has been compiled for 42 CPI markets in the ten regions, ready for editing and classification.
“A workshop is planned for December 2016 to assign COICOP codes to each item listed in the code book of the various markets,” he explained adding that the rebasing will fully be implemented in 2018.
Touching on the Integrated Business Establishment Survey, Mr. Wadieh stated that the service has completed data processing for the second phase and is in the process of preparing tabulations for analysis and reporting.
He disclosed that the GSS used the Ghana Community Network Service limited (GCNet) platform to access trade data from the database of the Ghana Revenue Authority for processing and dissemination trade statistics to users.
“A training workshop is planned from 20 to 25 November 2016 to build the capacity of staff to use the Cognus Impromtu, a web based software that allows querying and downloading of data from the GRA database for timely processing and analysis,” he said.
Mr. Wadieh further stated that the GSS was working in collaboration with the FAO Global Office and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to pilot AGRIS, a new methodology for collecting information on post harvest agriculture activities.
He explained that the field test will focus mainly on the structure and content of the questionnaire as well as the sampling guidelines.
He stated that the project is in support of the Global Strategy to Improve Agriculture and Rural Statistics.
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