The coun­try's head­line in­fla­tion rate rose slight­ly to 3.1 per cent, lat­est da­ta from the Cen­tral Bank shows. Ac­cord­ing to the Cen­tral Bank's Mon­e­tary Pol­i­cy Com­mit­tee, the rate was up from 2.9 per cent in Ju­ly.

Core in­fla­tion, which ex­cludes food prices, in­creased from 2.0 per cent to 2.2 per cent be­tween Ju­ly and Au­gust, while food in­fla­tion rose from 6.8 per cent to 7.2 per cent.

For the first sev­en months of the year, do­mes­tic eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty re­mained sub­dued. Out­put of nat­ur­al gas and crude oil de­clined by just over 10 per cent, part­ly due to con­tin­ued main­te­nance and up­grade pro­grammes by ma­jor en­er­gy com­pa­nies. In­di­ca­tors on con­struc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion al­so showed slug­gish non-en­er­gy sec­tor ac­tiv­i­ty in­to the third quar­ter, al­though fi­nance main­tained some buoy­an­cy.

"The lat­est of­fi­cial labour sta­tis­tics point to a small rise in the un­em­ploy­ment rate from 3.5 per cent in the fi­nal quar­ter of 2015 to 3.8 per cent in the first three months of 2016," the Cen­tral Bank said.

The re­port con­tin­ued: "Liq­uid­i­ty in the fi­nan­cial sys­tem re­mained rel­a­tive­ly steady dur­ing the third quar­ter, with com­mer­cial banks' ex­cess re­serves at the Cen­tral Bank av­er­ag­ing around $3.2 bil­lon dai­ly. The Cen­tral Bank stepped up its open mar­ket op­er­a­tions in Sep­tem­ber, with net is­sues of around $1.2 bil­lion in the month to Sep­tem­ber 26. In ad­di­tion, the Bank's sales of for­eign ex­change ex­tract­ed the equiv­a­lent of rough­ly $1 bil­lion from the sys­tem."

Growth in pri­vate sec­tor cred­it lost some mo­men­tum due in part to a fall-off in lend­ing to busi­ness­es. How­ev­er, cred­it to the pri­vate sec­tor by the con­sol­i­dat­ed fi­nan­cial sec­tor rose by 4.9 per cent in Ju­ly, while lend­ing to busi­ness­es slipped by -0.2 per cent.

"Against this back­drop the Cen­tral Bank's Mon­e­tary Pol­i­cy Com­mit­tee de­cid­ed to main­tain the "Re­po" rate at 4.75 per cent at its Sep­tem­ber 2016 meet­ing. The bank will con­tin­ue to care­ful­ly analyse do­mes­tic and in­ter­na­tion­al eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ments in its de­lib­er­a­tions and de­ci­sions."

The next Mon­e­tary Pol­i­cy An­nounce­ment is sched­uled for No­vem­ber 25.