DOHA: Education is becoming expensive in Qatar due to constantly increasing tuition and other fees.
Its cost rose 11.4 percent in the past two years, reveal comparisons of data for last January and those for 2013.
However, the maximum increase in prices since 2013 has been in tobacco products, including cigarettes.
‘House rents, water, electricity and gas’ rank third in terms of price rise (8.2 percent), consumer price index (CPI) for January 2015 shows.
Transport as a separate expense overhead became 5.3 percent expensive, while furnishing and household appliances have become 4.8 percent costlier since 2013.
CPI data released by the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics for last January reflect that overall inflation since 2013 was 3.4 percent.
The ministry has rebased CPI from 2007 to 2013 as it does it every five years.
The number of expense categories for which consumer price indices have been issued (for example, food and beverages as a category) is now 12 instead of eight.
And the weight of all these categories has been readjusted in the new CPI basket. CPI measures changes in the prices of goods and services to track consumer price inflation.
In the new basket, the weight of ‘rent, fuel and energy’ (rephrased as ‘housing, water, electricity, gas) has been lowered to 21.89 percent from 32.1.
Earlier the rental component included an amount representing an assumed value for the owner-occupied housing unit.
The weight of ‘recreation and culture’ has gone up to 12.7 percent in the new CPI basket from 4.1 percent since the category includes expenses incurred on foreign travel and leisure.
Eating out is another category whose weight has been increased in the new basket — from 3.7 percent to 6.1.
According to the weights assigned, families spend more on recreation than on food and beverages.
And nearly as much as half the money a household spends on food a month is spent on eating out. The Peninsula
