Vietnam\'s consumer price index (CPI) in September rose by 0.82 percent against last month – the lowest single monthly increase since the beginning of the year – and 22.41 percent over the same period in 2010.
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The figure helped push the CPI in the first nine month of the year to 16.63 percent, and up 18.16 percent compared to the corresponding time last year, the General Statistics Office (GSO) reported on Saturday.
According to Nguyen Duc Thang, director of the GSO\'s Pricing Statistics Department, the national September CPI was still higher than most years of the past 15 years and just lower than September of 2010 and 1998, when the economy was experiencing a difficult time.
"This shows the rising CPI trend has yet to stop; it is just decelerating," Thang said.
Nine out of 11 commodity groups recorded increases, ranging from 0.28 to 8.62 percent, of which education services saw the sharpest hike with 8.62 percent as a result of rising educational costs at the beginning of the new school year.
Commodities with increases of less than 1 percent included catering services (0.92 percent), clothing (0.9 percent), transport (0.24 percent) and post and telecommunications (0.07 percent).
During the month, the gold price soared 13.14 percent against last month, helping increase the price over the past nine months by 30.48 percent over December 2010, a year-on-year increase of 61.26 percent.
The US dollar experienced a month-on-month rise of 0.8 percent, pushing up the price over the past nine months by 1.12 percent compared to the end of 2010 and by 7.78 percent over the corresponding time last year.
Thang said it would be very difficult to curb the inflation rate to between 17-18 percent this year, as the remaining room for the increase during the next three months (the busiest months of the year) was just 1.3 percent.
Industrial output
The GSO also reported that the country\'s Index of Industrial Production (IIP) rose by 2.1 percent in September over last month, helping raise the IIP during the past nine months of this year to 7.8 percent over the same period last year.
The slowing growth of industrial production IIP since August reflects the negative impacts of high inflation and lending interest rates, and rising input costs, which have forced companies to narrow their business operations, according to the GSO.
Some main industrial products recorded decreases in the first nine months compared to the same period last year, including crude oil and natural gas (0.4 percent), pharmaceuticals (1.4 percent), electrical wire and cable (23.1 percent) and shipbuilding (26.7 percent).
However, production of some products maintained good growth rates, such as pottery and porcelain, except construction pottery (71.8 percent), sugar (43.2 percent), fertiliser (15.8 percent), yarn and cloth (13.5 percent), footwear (13.3 percent), cement (10.6 percent) and electricity (9.8 percent).
According to GSO experts, the hurdles to restoring a high growth rate will continue to pose a problem, due to a shrinking consumption market and large stockpiles of products in the industrial sector.