12 November 2013
BEIRUT: The International Monetary Fund will help Lebanon streamline its consumer price index calculation in a bid to obtain more accurate information about the fluctuation of prices. A special team from the IMF held talks with officials, private sector representatives and the head of the labor unions in Lebanon to assess the performance of the current Central Administration of Statistics and to apply new techniques.
The changes will be mainly applied to the transport, education, rent and communications sectors. In the transport sector, for instance, prices of the three modes of transport air, land and sea will each be calculated separately.
Similarly, the new indicators will provide a breakdown of the prices of public and private modes of transport.
Moreover, the new indicators will provide a breakdown of the cost of rents in Beirut and the price in other areas outside the capital, as well as old and new rent prices.
The IMF is also planning to fund the purchase of equipment that would automatically transmit the cost of commodities from markets to the Central Administration of Statistics to swiftly determine whether there was any fluctuation in prices.
During the meeting, head of the Lebanese merchants association Nicolas Chammas praised the performance of the Central Administration of Statistics, saying it was the only official source for statistics because it had the most skilled human resources and covered tens of thousands of commodities prices. No other institution is able to compete with it, he said.
Chammas emphasized the importance of adopting these new techniques starting next year in order to increase transparency.
He said that the cost of living indicators released by the Central Administration of Statistics witnessed a growth of 0.6 percent in September 2013 compared to September 2012.
This was due mainly to the increase in the cost of education by 14 percent during the same time interval, he added.
Meanwhile, head of the General Labor Confederation Ghassan Ghosn noted that when the Central Administration of Statistics releases its first results using the new techniques, the GLC would make a comparison between these numbers its own assessment of inflation.
Copyright The Daily Star 2013.
