The cost of everyday living in Qatar has gone up for the fourth consecutive month, fueled by increases in the price of rent, fuel, furniture and domestic appliances, new government statistics show.
The rise comes despite an apparent slowdown in price increases in March, with some groups that had previously shown a decrease or remained constant, like medical care and entertainment, going up again in April.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for April 2014, released by the Ministry of Development and Planning Statistics this week, was 2.8 percent higher than the same month last year, and up 0.2 percent from March 2014.
What’s gone up
The “Rentals, Fuel & Energy” and “Furniture, Textiles & Home Appliances” groups increased marginally month-on-month (by 0.7 percent), but year-on-year, rents have increased by 6.3 percent, and furnishings by 5.1 percent.
Clothes and shoes are also driving the increase, with the cost of these essentials rising by 0.3 percent in one month, and 4 percent over the year.
The only items to go down in price last month were food and drink and “miscellaneous goods and services,” a category that typically includes items such as hairdressing, soap and cosmetics.
Here’s the breakdown:
Thoughts?
Human beings have 3 basic requirement – food, clothing, housing. Regulating the prices for these basic necessities while floating the price for rest of the commodities based upon market conditions would be positive for society.
qatar govt should regulate the price of clothes..?
Yes my perspective is based upon necessities and not luxury…not that I am against use of food, clothing and housing as a luxury but society should be given access to the basics at a subsidized rate including clothes as well.
Maslow set the needs to 5… These are part of the lowest 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
The Holy Prophet (s.a.) mentioned three of them as fundamental physical needs.
But as for spiritual/psychological needs are concerned I believe in the following, they need to take place in the following order to achieve this,
1) Inter-religious harmony first
2) Social Peace
3) Socio-economic Peace
4) Economic Peace
5) Individual Peace
6) Global World Peace
As per Maslow, he places economics – safety, resources, employment, morality before social – love, belonging, friendship, sexual intimacy but this should be the other way around. By first achieving a sense of love and belonging in society, economic peace can only prevail. In the present period, we have some remnants of temporary social peace disposed right after the 2nd world war, once this social stability disappears, economic conditions will deteriorate accordingly and in principal the next world war would begin.
You pump a lot of money into any economy and rapidly increase the number of immigrants you will get inflation. Hardly a surprise.
Finally, somebody who has sense… It’s not only the greed of the providers/sellers, inflation increases every price we pay.
Perfectly true however this does point to poor planning by the powers that be when they embarked on this project. (I mean all projects.) They knew what was at hand but failed to plan for the influx of workers. The vast majority are labourers I imagine but there seems to be enough white collar people to keep the heat on in the higher end housing market. It is a good way to keep the wealth at home though as salaries paid out are finding their way back into the Qatari ecomony and not being taken out of the country.
Rent money stays here, everything else is imported, and a big chunk of the money goes out.
Actually, a lot of it goes abroad as the property leaders tend to speculate heavily in overseas real estate. I find it ironic how the English go to Doha, pay exorbitant rents so that the property owners can then go to London and drive up the value of the homes they left behind.
No country in the history of mankind has ever planned in advance for such a rapid expansion of people and money. In fact business wait until the demand is there as a general rule rather than say building accommodation based on a few projections. Hindsight is great, but very few are willing to risk their money on a possibility.
But most of the tall buildings downtown still are or were empty for quite awhile.
Try but you need to know the reasons why….. Our Qatari friends could enlighten you….
It was a simple reason. I’m not stating it here. 🙂
Hint: Build or lose.
Yes but we are not dealing with a normal country with normal constraints.
Monopolies and Oligopolies play a big role as well.
True the market is distorted, from your greedy Qatari landlord trying to squeeze every last riyal out of his tenants to the Kerala shop owner who puts his prices up 20% when he sees a Qatari or westerner enter.
I find apartments and villas here ridiculously expensive to rent, even by Western standards.
If I had a home mortgage for the prince of rent I pay on my villa here I’d live in a palace back home.
LOL … There’s an easy reply to that.
And there’s the point, people come for the jobs and the money, so inflation is a necessary consequence. For example house prices around the best schools in the UK attract a premium, due to supply and demand. Same, same.
In my experince here the rules of supply and demand don’t apply here, otherwise the Pearl would be 5qr a month as there is lots of supply and no demand!!!
For a lot of expats is money-laundering scheme. Qatar gov or gov-backed industry contracts with major Western company. Company brings over its people and places them in expensive villas, and then passes on the bill (either directly or indirectly in the cost of the service) to Qatar gov or gov-backed industry. High rent proceeds then go to a major developer, who probably had a major stake in the gov-backed industry to start with.
Brilliant!
Money laundering scheme?!?! Please look up the definition of this term……
High rents are a reaction to hype of the influx of people, supposed under supply, and general influation (although this is the main fuul of the inflation fire).
The only prices that I am worry about is when I go to QDC.
It is a worry, the govt should subsidise them for expats to promote mental health well being…..
Really? Mental health well-being? I don’t mean to be mean or insulting in any way, but what’s up with some expats and alcohol? I don’t get it… Is alcohol to you like Karak is to Qataris?
It was a joke…. But 10 beers on a Thursday night does help me get through the car crash of the week…pun intended…
enjoy your 3% increments doha
This also has a lot to do with the maturing of the Doha labor market.
Initially, Western expats, who command higher salaries, were brought in for all sorts of jobs. As the Eurozone and the US have recovered, there are fewer willing to come, and more savvy Qatari business and institutions have realized that they can get better value for money in certain positions by hiring Arabs and South Asians, particularly in engineering and some areas of finance.
Rents are artificially high as it is a way of redistributing ‘wealth’ (to a limited extent) to the close circle of landlords.
And thank god the rate of the bottles at QDC have not gone up this summer and neither have the rates gone up for the bottles of lotions and cologne like Lumia so everyone stays happy this hot summer
I was pretty shocked at the level of rents here in Qatar, in fact it almost wipes out the advantage of mot paying income tax. For the price I pay for my accommodation here, I would be able to rent something pretty amazing in the UK, or cover the mortgage payments on a substantial property. Not all of us have our accommodation paid for by our employers, as sex discrimination is alive and well here, and apparently I should be kept by my husband or father.