In October 2020, the Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB) conducted the first round of price collection using its updated Consumer Price Index (CPI) basket1. This new basket was derived using detailed data on household spending obtained from the 2018/2019 Household Budget Survey. It represents a more current list of goods and services that households in Belize frequently purchase and is an improved representation of consumer spending patterns. This new basket contains a total of 409 items, compared to 260 in the previous basket. Category weights, which represent what percentage of households’ incomes are spent on particular categories of goods and services, have also been updated.
The distribution of household spending was generally consistent with the previous category weights. The only major shift seen was that ‘Food and Nonalcoholic Beverages’ overtook ‘Housing, Water, Electricity, Gas and Other Fuels’ as the category with the highest weight in the basket. This means that a larger percentage of households’ budgets now go towards ‘Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages’ than any other category. This also means that changes in food prices will have a greater impact on the CPI and inflation rates than they did under the previous basket. The base period for the Consumer Price Index is now set at October 2020.
For the month of October 2020, the All-Items CPI stood at 100.0. This was an overall decrease of 0.5% when compared to the 100.5 recorded for October 2019. This does not indicate that all prices decreased during the period. Rather, it reflects the fact that notably higher prices in the ‘Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages’ and ‘Housing, Water, Electricity, Gas and Other Fuels’ categories were balanced out by lower prices in ‘Transport’, and ‘Clothing and Footwear’, resulting in the marginal decline of 0.5%. The ‘Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages’ category recorded a notable increase of 1.7% for the month of October 2020 when compared to October 2019, as food prices continued to trend steadily upward for the sixth consecutive month. This was mainly attributable to increased vegetable prices, which were 9.8% higher than they were in October of last year. Onions, tomatoes, cabbages, and red kidney beans were among the items in this category that rose substantially. Additionally, increases were seen in items across the various food sub-categories, with prices for whole chickens, rice, eggs and milk notably higher than they were in October 2019. Notwithstanding these increases, there were reductions in the prices of some food items, including pork chops, sweet peppers and pineapples.
For the month of October 2020, consumer prices across all the remaining categories of goods and services combined recorded an average decrease of 0.8% when compared to October 2019. The ‘Clothing and Footwear’ category was down by 1.8%, primarily due to lower prices for women’s clothing, and was the main contributor to the overall reduction across this grouping of categories. Additionally, ‘Communication’ saw a decrease of 3.3%, as a result of lower prices for some telephone services, and ‘Restaurants and Hotels’ declined by 12.2%, owing to lower hotel accommodation prices.
With an inflation rate of 0.2%, the city of Belmopan experienced the highest increase in consumer prices for October 2020, as consumers in this municipality experienced higher prices for food, clothing and men’s footwear, home rental costs and pharmaceutical products. All other municipalities recorded an overall reduction in consumer prices, the most notable being in Dangriga, which saw a decline of 1.4%. Consumers in this town saw greater than average price reductions in home rental costs and accommodation services. Following Dangriga is Corozal which saw a decline of 1.3%, Punta Gorda with 0.6%, Orange Walk with 0.4%, Belize District with 0.3%, and Santa Elena/San Ignacio with 0.2%.
