By: Arret Jatta
The Central Bank of The Gambia (CBG) on Tuesday held a press conference to inform the public about the recent developments, regarding inflation and how it is expected to go down before the end of this year.
“Global headline inflation continues to decelerate as moderating energy and food prices, along with monetary tightening continue to exert significant downward pressure on inflation in most regions. The IMF estimated global headline inflation for 2023 at 6.8 percent and revised the forecast for 2024 downwards by 0.2 percentage points to 5.8 percent,” said the CBG governor.
Inflation is the general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money. Over the years, many countries have been experiencing inflation, especially The Gambia, leading to increases in foodstuff prices, devaluation of the currency and other issues.
Governor Saidy, however, said that the pace of the disinflation process varies with advanced economies seeing a faster decline in headline inflation while emerging markets and developing economies are forecast to experience a slower deceleration in inflation.
He added that international commodity prices continued to decline driven by the falling prices of food, metals, and copper that outweighed the surge in crude oil prices.
“The IMF All Commodity Prices Index fell by 0.3 percent in January 2024 from the level it was in December 2022 and by 12.9 percent from a year ago,” added the CBG boss.
He pointed out that the Gambia’s currency is stable.
“The Dalasi continues to be stable, depreciating only modestly year-on-year against major international trading currencies in 2023. It depreciated against the US dollar by 38 percent, Euro by 103 percent, GBP by 12.7 percent and CFA by 142 percent. CBG continues to hold comfortable levels of international reserves amounting to US$475.3 million in January 2024, which is sufficient to finance over 5 months of prospective imports of goods and services,” he reported.
The CBG governor emphasized that the Central Bank continues to implement reforms to enhance the efficiency of the foreign exchange market.
