SL revises down August inflation after calculation error: stat office

REUTERS: Sri Lanka has revised down its inflation figure for August after finding a calculation error, the country’s statistics office said yesterday.
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 percent in August from a year earlier instead of 4.3 percent, slowing from growth of 5.5 percent in the previous month. Prices had hit a 32-month high of 6.0 percent 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 percent from 4.7 percent, slowing from the previous month’s 5.8 percent. It hit a 38-month high of 6.6 percent in May.