'Inflation in Vietnam rises to 21%'

from radioaustralia.......

"SNOWDON: Vietnam's inflation rate reached 28% two years ago and hit triple figures in the 1980's. Economist Adam McCarty thinks inflation will rise to 25% this year before beginning to fall. He says some government policies like controlling credit have kept inflation from ballooning to past excesses but other policies are poorly targetted

MCCARTY: They try to regulate their way out of these problems by regulating absolutely everything and targetting absolutely every policy instrument.

SNOWDON: Is it working?

MCCARTY: Yes, but some of the policy choices cause more pain than gain.They underestimate the business uncertainty that they create by regularly changing a lot of small business regulations like it's become more difficult to import consumer goods. They've added more paperwork requirements, simply just to reduce imports of consumer goods as a tiny little step towards solving their trade balance issue.

SNOWDON: Professor Adam Fforde from Victoria University says the problem started with the credit surge when Vietnam joined the WTO in 2007, and has been made worse through political interference in the central bank.

FFORDE: Well I think the underlying politics of this are very hard to resolve unless either somebody pops up to the top who has authority to knock heads together and that hasn't happened, or you have some probably very Vietnamese complicated process of political development which basically means that the population through some process participates in elections or something, which means again the government has authority to govern. Neither of those two things appear to be happening".................LINK