Press release
Philipsburg, February 19th 2016
Consumer prices Sint Maarten December 2015 Prices have decreased slightly compared to October 2015
The consumer price index for Sint Maarten has decreased in the month of December 2015 by 0.3 percent compared to that of October 2015.
When comparing average consumer prices over a twelve month period (Dec. 2014 to Dec. 2015), an increase of 0.3 percent was recorded compared to the same period one year earlier. Inflation has shown an overall decline in 2015 (0.3%) compared to the rate of inflation recorded in 2014 (1.9%). This is also notable in the major expenditure categories; ‘Housing’ and ‘Transport & Communication’, which both recorded significant declines in the rate of inflation approximately 187% and 136% respectively compared to that of 2014; whilst the major expenditure category ‘Food’ recorded inflation of approximately 10 percent higher than that of 2014. Most notably is that four of the nine expenditure categories recorded deflation in December 2015, which largely contributed to the significantly lower annual inflation rate for 2015.
This is evident from the data that has been released by the Department of Statistics (STAT) today.