“The increase in food and beverage prices consumed outside, especially in restaurants and hotels, is the main contributor to the inflation rate,” he said at a press conference.

He said, however, that the nation’s inflation rate had dipped to 3.8% for December 2022 from November’s 4%.

He said all components of the consumer price index (CPI) had subsided except for restaurants and hotels, housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels.

To tackle cost of living issues, he said several government agencies were in the midst of formulating a new strategy for a “quick win solution” which would be announced in the near future.

These include agencies from his ministry, the finance ministry, the agriculture and food security ministry, and the domestic trade and cost of living ministry (KPDN).

The Pandan MP also highlighted the OpenDOSM platform, launched by the statistics department, which sets out data for prices of 28 million goods from all over the country.

The data was sourced from the PriceCatcher application developed by KPDN, he said.

He said the platform would give the people the opportunity to monitor the rise and fall of prices of goods, alongside the government’s monitoring of the items at the macro-level.

If there was any drop in the inflation rate to a more moderate level, it would be translated into the prices paid by consumers, he said. Otherwise, it would be a problem, he added.

He also said if the inflation rate dropped to 3.2% or 3% by April, then at the macro-level, it would seem that the prices of raw goods as per the CPI were at a “healthy rate” for the economy.

However, he said if consumers continued to pay high prices for goods, “we’ll need to address this gap”.