It also rose 1.23 percent over last December, with the high increase this year attributed to the surge in eating out, shopping and travel demands of people during Tet or the Lunar New Year, Vietnam’s biggest national holiday.

The General Statistics Office (GSO) said that in the CPI basket, 10 major groups of consumer goods and services saw their price indices rise in January, led by food and catering services with a 2.29 percent increase.

It was followed by housing and construction materials costs, up 1.47 percent; transportation, 0.69 percent; beverages and tobacco 0.65 percent; and garments and footwear, 0.33 percent. Meanwhile, post and telecommunications decreased slightly by 0.03 percent.

The government has targeted keeping CPI below 4 percent in 2020 this year, the same as the last three years, but GSO head Nguyen Bich Lam has warned that this may be difficult to achieve, given impacts of the African swine fever epidemic, which wiped out 6 million pigs last year, forecast to remain a major challenge.