Higher cost of living is never good, only bad for low income individuals.
The rising of food (goods) prices in Laos could be primarily caused by the announcement of increased salary for public servants.
Due to lack of proper regulations, sellers take this opportunity to increase the price of their goods.
Here is simple example, if you are a seller and your regular customers are Lao people. One day a group of falang walk in and want to buy
your goods, you expect that these falang have more money than typical Lao people so you would ask for higher price than you normally ask from Lao people.
That's the ideas. It's all about expectation. The value of your goods today, is derived from what you expect it would be in the future.
I'm the owner of the comment you mention above and want to make some friendly corrections here na krub
When you talk about inflation, basically you talk about the basket of neccessary goods, you are right.
but as long as (many) people still put those fish sauces in their meals, it is still counted as the factor affects inflation anyway.
So there's no point of saying that the non neccesary foods are not included in the inflation because we are talking about individual utilities that decrease due to the inflation(thence fish sauce should be included for that individual who consumes), we are not talking on the overall measurement for the country.
(in other words, the basket of food contains differently amongst different people)
The comment above was purely based on the assumption that there is only foods in the basket of inflation. However, in the real world, there are so many other neccesary goods that have to be taken into account. In this case, shampoo, soap, or even toothpaste are mostly imported from Thailand. Therefore you cannot deny that Laos consumer goods price are highly dependent to the Thai price krub:)
Let me said something why is cost of living to expensive! The reasons for that is the Central Bank of Lao PDR can not control the demand prices of goods because supply is very low. For example, Lao people don't prefer use their own currency, instead Lao people like foreign currency such as Thai baht and US currency in the markets around the country. So that the value of Lao currency is very depreciation that's why the cost of living is too high and everything will get very expensive domestic products are not supply to Lao markets because Lao people have to imports demand goods from neighbors countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam and China to feed their own markets. Event thought Laos economic is continue growing if Lao Central Bank doesn't control the markets price down and it will affect all the middle class and low income people entire the country. That is my Thought.
