The Consumer Price Index for November 2022 rose 10.2 percent compared to November 2021.
This was mainly influenced by the increase in the Imported goods component by 13.3 percent from the same month last year as a result of higher prices for building materials, fuel, and imported food. However, when compared to the previous month, the CPI fell 2.5 percent.
The Local goods component also contributed to the increase when it went up by 6.9 percent on a year-on-year (y-o-y) basis, due to higher prices for meals, phone calls, internet, airline fares, and local food items. Graph 1 shows the percentage changes over the same month last year in the Consumer Price Index by all Divisions from November 2021 to November 2022.
Food & Non Alcoholic Beverages was the largest contributor to the 10.2 percent rise in the CPI in November 2022, with a contribution of 5.0 percentage points (pp) to the overall increase in November 2022.
The most significant drivers of this within the group were chicken leg quarters (up 6.9%), raw sugar (up 26.7%), bread (up 11.3%), corned beef (up18.5%), rice (up 29.3%), cooking oil (up 74.9%), flour (up 44.4%), onion (up 39.9%), Chinese cabbage (up 39.4%), potatoes (up 32.2%), vermicelli (up 36.4%) and taamu (up 43.1%). The next largest contributor was Transport with a contribution of 2.6 pp, increasing 16.8% compared to November 2021.
The greatest drivers of this increase were petrol increasing 22.9%, airfares (Apia-Pago-Apia) rising 71.1% and (Apia-Auckland-Apia) up 32.1% and diesel increasing 45.5% from the same month of the previous year. Communication also contributed 0.7 percentage points due to the increase in internet and mobile phone calling per minute.
