The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that the weights deployed by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) to calculate the monthly consumer price index (CPI) are “severely outdated.”

The CPI is used to measure inflation by tracking the changes over time in the prices paid by consumers for a basket of goods and services. The basket’s composition and weighting are usually based on surveys of household or family expenditure habits.

Nigeria’s inflation rate, in January 2023, increased to 21.82 percent, up from 21.34 percent in the previous month.

The IMF, in its recently released 2022 article IV consultation report on Nigeria, said that the NBS inflation index does not provide a true representation of current expenditure patterns.

It warned that outdated weights can lead to bias in the inflation index.