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We'll get to that picture later but first, here's a snapshot of the how your purchasing power has fluctuated on the usual household items for to months of January to July. Statistician Angelita Campbell explained today at the SIB press conference:

Angelita Campbell, Statistician
"The diagram in front of us now illustrates the spending pattern of the average Belizean household and that information was taken from the 2008 household expenditure survey. If we look closely at the information presented, we have housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels taking roughly about 26% of the spending. Food, non-alcoholic beverages are roughly 20% and transport is roughly 14%. Those three categories sum to about 60% of the average household spending. in the food and nonalcoholic beverages category we saw a variation in terms of prices across the board, some of which, might be went up by roughly 5%, we had vegetables and fruits going up and also sugar increasing in that category. However we saw red kidney beans going down by roughly 11% as we've been seeing since the start of this year. Chicken went down by 0.7% and we also saw a decrease in egg roughly 15%."

From there, Statistician Stephanie Vasquez took a look at the country's import and export earnings to measure how the different industries have been performing so far for this year. Here's her outline:

Stephanie Vasquez, Statistician
"The period of January to July of this year, Belize's imports were valued at 1.1 billion dollars, down 3.4% or 40.2 million from January to July of 2015. It was observed that the categories that contributed the most to this period's declining imports are to a large extent the export processing zones, mineral fuels and lubricants, the commercial free zones and to a lesser degree, manufactured goods. In 2016 the export processing zones category failed by 37 million dollars to 31 million dollars. Machinery and transport equipment which is Belize's largest import type grew by 49 million dollars to 303 million dollars. A 19% increase over that of January to July 2015 mostly contributed to the rising imports of parts and 4 cylinder vehicles. When imports of 2015 and 2016 are compared by month, it was observed that imports in general have been trending down. April and May 2016 were the exception as large spikes in machinery and transport equipment drove imports beyond what was recorded for April and May 2015. Domestic exports for the period January to July of this year totaled 261.8 million dollars, down 29% or 106.8 million from January to July of 2015. All major exports with the exception of citrus followed the period and hence is the cause of 29% drop in the export earnings. Marine exports fell by a substantial 40.2 million dollars to 19 million dollars due almost entirely to plummeting shrimp exports. Sugar exports dropped by 35.6 million dollars to 68 million dollars mainly due to changes to the scheduling of bulk shipments and to a lesser extent, lower prices for that commodity. Banana declined by 17.6 million dollars to 42 million dollars while crude gains diminished by 11 million dollars to 12.5 million dollars. Citrus, the only major export to have performed positively over the period saw increased earnings of 5.2 million dollars growing to 68.2 million dollars."

So, the negative performance of the country's exports has caused the GDP to shrink by 1.6%. Statistician Jefte Ochaeta provided a look at the bigger context of how a downturn in the productive sector drives the overall economy down:

Jefte Ochaeta, Statistician
"So for the months of April - June, the economy in Belize producing goods and services has fell by 1.6% basically a decrease of 11.3 million dollars compared to the year of 2015 around that same period. So in this graph here we can see basically for the second part of GDP how it's decreased throughout the series observing that it had been increase and then in 2014-2016 there has been a fall in the 2nd part of GDP. When we take into account the first 6 months, the economy has had also a negative performance of 1.5% or as we are seeing here basically it's decreasing substantially by about 14 million dollars. So what's been causing the decrease in the 2nd part of GDP? First of all, there has been a record decrease in the -- industries of 26% maybe due to a fact that we've observed a decrease of 4.6% in agricultural production."

The Total value of goods and services produced in the last 3 months was $713 million, which is 11 million dollars less than last year's production of 724.5 million dollars.