Existing empirical studies do not agree on the role that monetary aggregates play in driving
inflation in Vietnam, in part because this is likely to have changed over time. Hung and Pfau
(2008) find that the M2 measure of money supply Granger-caused real output growth but not
inflation over the period 1996–2005. IMF (2003) reports empirical findings that broad money
growth can explain only 10 percent of the variation in core inflation over the period 1995–
2003, and concludes that the role of monetary aggregates on consumer price inflation is
neither robust nor very significant. By contrast, IMF (2006) concludes that growth of M2
money supply significantly affected inflation dynamics in Vietnam, with a twelve month lag,
over the period 2001–2006. The differing conclusions of IMF (2003) and IMF (2006) is
likely due to the liberalization of domestic prices over the period 2002-2004, which probably
increased the responsiveness of domestic prices to monetary aggregates. IMF (2006) also
finds that CPI inflation responds positively to a narrowing of the output gap (i.e., as actual
GDP increases relative to potential, inflationary pressures begin to emerge). Minh (2009) and
Nguyen and Nguyen (2010) both find that growth of M2 money supply has a modest and
significant (positive) impact on CPI inflation, but after a significant delay of five months or
longer. Camen (2006) finds that growth of M2 money supply explains less than 5 percent of
the forecast variance of CPI inflation, but that growth of total credit to the economy explains
around 25 percent of the forecast variance after 24 months, in an empirical study covering the
period 1996–2005.