Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Zimbabwe Prices Fell 7.7% in 2009 From Hyperinflation



Bloomberg) -- Consumer prices in Zimbabwe fell 7.7 percent last year, after the southern African nation abandoned its currency and switched to the dollar to rein in an inflation rate in the hundreds of billions.




Prices rose 0.5 percent in December, Moffat Nyoni, the head of the country’s statistics agency, said in a telephone interview from the capital Harare today. The annual inflation figure was the first one the government has released since 2008.



Zimbabwe began using U.S. dollars to calculate consumer prices in December 2008. It abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar for all transactions in February, when the Morgan Tsvangirai-led Movement for Democratic Change formed a power-sharing government with President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front party.



Inflation peaked at more than 500 billion percent before the government switched to the U.S. dollar, according to an IMF estimate last year.

--Editors: Ben Holland, Karl Maier.


To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Latham in Johannesburg at +27-39-9762641 +27-39-9762641 or blatham@bloomberg.net