Inflation

Over the past month the price of everything has gone up 25-40%, which was surprising in that prices hadn’t changed at all for anything since I’d gotten here. The one exception is gasoline, whose cost is almost always the same since most of it is taken from Nigeria and smuggled into Benin. For some reason the price of crude oil has no bearing whatsoever on gas here - when oil was trading at $98/bbl the price of gas here actually went down about 10 cents. The only time the price changes is when the government cracks down on smugglers (at which point gas can double in price).