Vietnam faces surging inflation pressure: official

Vietnam is likely to curb inflation at 4% this year as targeted, but it will face surging pressure towards the end of this year and next year, says a senior officer of the General Statistics Office (GSO).

“It is likely that the consumer price index will increase in late 2022 and in 2023 due to some factors like increased raw material prices in the world market. The U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes will make raw materials costlier,” Nguyen Thu Oanh, director of the GSO’s price statistics department, said at a Hanoi press meet on the employment situation Thursday.

Oanh added fuel prices were now on a downtrend, but in the long term the situation would be complicated, and an increase would affect Vietnam’s inflation. In addition, the Chinese economy’s recovery will increase energy prices, which would also affect the Vietnamese economy.

Some other factors that may push inflation up are prices of some services that may go up after years being kept unchanged, and the government’s efforts in increasing public investment, while prices of food and construction materials often increase together with rising consumer demand at the end of each year, she said.

Vietnam’s CPI in the third quarter of this year increased by 3.32% from a year earlier, according to the GSO. The figure for the first nine months of the year was up 1.88% year-on-year.

In September alone, the index went up 0.4% month-on-month, and 3.94% year-on-year, mainly due to increases in prices of essential goods and services as well as tuition fees in certain localities.