Doha: The Machinery and Equipment Price Index (MEPI) in Qatar reached 99.99 points in Q1 2026, up by 0.82 percent compared with Q4 2025 and 0.19 percent on an annual basis.
According to Qatar News Agency, the MEPI is one of the economic indicators produced by the National Planning Council (NPC), calculated using 2018 as a base year instead of 2013, to contribute with other statistical indicators for studying and analyzing the economic level of the state. This index aims to measure the average change in the selling prices of machinery and equipment, which are categorized as capital goods, by selecting a given basket of goods and monitoring their prices over subsequent periods of time with respect to that in a previous and fixed period called the base period.
The value of imports is used to calculate the relative weight for each MEPI group, and international standards are considered and followed in data collection and index dissemination. The MEPI basket consists of nine main groups distributed according to their relative importance. To calculate the MEPI, the Central Product Classification version 2 (CPC Ver.2) is used to classify the MEPI from Level 1 to Level 5.
An analysis on a quarter-on-quarter basis of MEPI (Q1 2026 against Q4 2025) shows that five of the main groups increased. These are: "Office, accounting and computing machinery" by 4.73 percent, "General purpose machinery" by 3.08 percent, "Musical instruments" by 2.75 percent, "Metal tools and tools" by 1.84 percent, and "Radio, television and communication equipment" by 0.77 percent.
A decrease was recorded in "Special-purpose machines" by 1.45 percent, "Transport Equipment" by 0.69 percent, "Medical appliances precision and optical instruments" by 0.52 percent, and "Machinery and electrical appliances" by 0.12 percent.
A comparison of the MEPI of Q1 2026 with Q1 2025 showed that there has been an increase of 0.19 percent, affected by price rises in groups, namely: "Office, accounting and computing machinery" by 4.35 percent, "Machinery and electrical appliances" by 3.94 percent, "Metal tools and tools" by 3.39 percent, "Musical instruments" by 1.95 percent, and "General purpose machinery" by 0.49 percent. As for decreases, they were recorded in four groups as follows: "Special-purpose machines" by 4.77 percent, "Medical appliances precision and optical instruments" by 1.73 percent, "Radio, television and communication equipment" by 1.07 percent, and "Transport equipment" by 0.83 percent.