Weekly News Bulletin - No. 01, November 2022

The consumer price index (CPI) posted year-on-year growth of 2.89 percent in the first ten months of 2022 while core inflation rose 2.14 percent, the General Statistics Office (GSO) revealed on October 29.

A contributor to the CPI hike was higher petrol prices, which went up 36.01 percent during the period, while gas prices fluctuated in line with changes in the global markets, up 15.35 percent from a year earlier. As the COVID-19 pandemic was brought under control, demand for restaurant services has bounced back, leading to a 4.6 percent rise in eating-out prices in the ten months. Prices of housing and construction materials also became more expensive, up 2.44 percent year on year. The 10-month core inflation went up 2.14 percent from a year earlier, lower than the CPI growth (2.89 percent), showing that changes in consumer prices were mainly driven by fluctuations in food, foodstuff, and petrol prices, the GSO noted.

Since 2010, EU enterprises have increased their investment in Vietnam despite the fact that the United Kingdom (UK) left the bloc. In general, the number of EU partners investing in Vietnam tends to increase over the years. By August 2022, the EU had a total of 2,378 valid projects in Vietnam, worth 27.59 billion USD, according to a report released on October 25 at the workshop on "FDI flows from the EU to Vietnam in the context of EVFTA and EVIPA" hosted by Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy Research and KAS funding.

According to the report, the EVFTA and EVIPA have raised the scale of FDI from EU member countries and FDI in general due to commitments on tariff reductions and creating competitive advantages for the countries in attracting the EU’s FDI. The main competitors in the region in terms of trade and investment do not have FTAs with the EU. Singapore is the only country in ASEAN that has signed an FTA with the EU. However, the digital transformation process may also narrow the EU's investment flows into Vietnam, especially those investing in high-value sectors, due to the change in investment objectives of multinational enterprises.

Last week highlight

Vietnam takes the lead and is set to post a 31 percent growth in gross merchandise value (GMV) from USD23 billion in 2022 to USD49 billion in 2025, according to the "e-Conomy SEA 2022" report released by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company on 27 October 2022.

The report said Southeast Asia’s top digital economies grew faster than expected in 2022 and are set to reach $200 billion in the total value of transactions made this year. The six major economies covered in the report, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, will achieve the milestone of $200 billion by 2022 which is three years earlier than scheduled. The 2022 GMV rose by about 20 percent from $161 billion in 2021. Southeast Asia continues to see growth in the number of internet users, with 20 million new users added in 2022, raising the total number of users to 460 million.

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Let’s look at some other key financial and business headlines during the past week