Stats. Dept. revises down Aug inflation after calculation error

Reuters: Sri Lanka has revised down its inflation figure for August after finding a calculation error, the country’s statistics office said on Friday.

The Central Bank’s tight monetary policy has set the island nation’s inflation on a gradually falling trend after it hit a peak in mid-2016.

“As soon as we noticed the error, we corrected it,” A.J. Satharasinghe, the Director General of the Department of Census and Statistics, told Reuters. “This is purely a calculation error. This is the first time it has happened.” The revised number shows consumer prices rose 4.0% in August from a year earlier instead of 4.3%, slowing from growth of 5.5% in the previous month. Prices had hit a 32-month high of 6.0% in June.

“It’s not a dramatic change,” said Shiran Fernando, an analyst at Colombo-based Frontier Research.

August core annual inflation, which excludes fresh food, energy, transport, rice and coconuts, was revised down to 4.1% from 4.7%, slowing from the previous month’s 5.8%. It hit a 38-month high of 6.6% in May.