Cairo, Egypt – Egypt’s official annual headline inflation rate rose in February to 31.9 percent, the highest in five and a half years, while core inflation soared to a record 40.26 percent, according to official data reported Thursday by Reuters.
The jump in inflation is likely to further squeeze households already struggling with high unemployment and poverty, and dent the government’s efforts to revive growth, which has slowed to its weakest pace in more than a decade.
Soaring inflation follows currency devaluations in March 2022, a prolonged foreign currency shortage, and a backlog of imports.
Urban consumer inflation for the year was 31.92 percent, the highest level since August 2017. According to data from the statistics office CAPMAS, it has been increasing gradually for more than a year and reached a high of 25.8 percent in January.
Since the central bank began disclosing the statistics in November 2009, the core inflation rate for February, which excludes volatile goods like food, was at its highest level, at 31.2 percent in January.
At its last meeting on February 2, the central bank kept its lending rate at 17.25 percent and the deposit rate at 16.25 percent, saying its hikes of 800 basis points over the last year should help to tame inflation.