Comesa, AfDB to harmonise consumer price index

THE Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) and the African Development Bank are working on harmonising consumer price indices in Africa to improve measurement process of national and regional harmonised consumer price indexes.

Zimbabwe is part of the 21-Comesa trading bloc alongside Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Rwanda, Egypt, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and Djibouti.

Last year, Comesa and the AfDB, signed an agreement that the latter would be the executing agency for Statistical Capacity Building Programme Phase V (SCB V) that targets 37 African Development Fund eligible countries.

Among the areas of intervention in the SCB V is the support to harmonisation of consumer price indices in the target countries and support to the regional economic communities (RECs) for the compilation of regional Harmonising Consumer Price Indexes (HCPIs).

Through their respective ministerial mandates, the RECs have continuously advocated for their secretariats and member countries to prioritise requirements of the agenda 2063, the global agenda 2030 for sustainable development and regional policies through the production and use of harmonised statistics including HCPIs.

“This is in recognition of the fact that successful regional integration requires accurate, reliable, timely, harmonised and comparable data within and across RECs to support policy planning, monitoring and evaluation. Thus, the RECs constitute the cornerstones of the integration agenda and therefore need to build commensurate statistical capacity over time to facilitate the process towards full integration,” said Comesa in a statement.

The bloc’s head of statistics, Themba Munalula, says it is planned that all AfDB’s Regional Member Countries (RMCs) undertake a rebasing of the price reference period of their HCPIs in the near future.

The long-term objective, said Munalula, is to derive a continental HCPI using harmonised individual country national HCPIs.

This requires a common methodological approach to ensure the international comparison of inflation, at least within RECs or at the continental level.

“It is also important to ensure that all RMCs have the same level of understanding of the full process of incorporating a new set of expenditure weights in the HCPI compilation, for the index to continue to reflect as much as possible the evolving patterns of consumer purchases,” he said.-ebusinesswekly