Batanai Matsika 
A recent tweet on Zimbabwe inflation estimates by Professor Steve Hanke, a Professor of Applied Economics at the Johns Hopkins University and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has caught many by surprise given that his y-o-y inflation of 455 percent is below the official figure of 761.02 percent.
Hanke also stated in his tweet that it is “absolute nonsense” to claim that Zimbabwe is experiencing “significant hyperinflation”.
To him, Zimbabwe is nowhere near hyperinflation. His method involves calculating implied annual inflation rates using high-frequency data. According to Hanke, the most important price in an economy is the exchange rate between the local currency and the world’s reserve currency (US dollar).
As long as there is an active black-market for currency and the data are available, changes in the black-market exchange rate can be reliably transformed into accurate estimates of countrywide inflation rates. The economic principle of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) allows for this transformation.
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