Where's the Priciest Shop Space? Vietnam

The hundreds of bustling market stalls that make up Ho Chi Minh City's Ben Thanh market couldn't be more different from the sparkling shop fronts of Hollywood's Rodeo Drive or London's Bond Street.

But data released by the tax office in Vietnam's commercial centre shows that shop space in the 147-year-old market is changing hands for probably more than anywhere else on earth.

Prices in Ben Thanh have jumped about 40% in the past two years to 230 taels of gold - £91,000 - a square metre, Reuters reported today. They even eclipse Tokyo's Ginza shopping district, long-reputed to be the world's priciest retail area, where space sells for about £69,000 a square metre.

And this is in spite of an average annual income in Vietnam of £338.

Retail experts believe the figures. "It doesn't surprise me at all that rents for prime pitches in the market are escalating to such levels," Marc Townsend, the managing director of property firm CB Richard Ellis's Vietnam office, told the Guardian. "You can buy everything except an Exocet missile there, and perhaps you can even get one of those."

The Lonely Planet guidebook encapsulates the market in the sentence: "The legendary slogan of US country stores applies equally well here, 'If we don't have it, you don't need it'."

Most stalls are open from 7am to 6pm and trade is almost always brisk.

"The best-placed stalls are so prized they don't usually change hands very often," Mr Townsend said.

And there is another major difference between Ben Thanh and Ginza, Bond Street or Rodeo Drive. While shops in the latter three locations usually occupy hundreds, if not thousands, of square metres, the vast majority of stalls in Ben Thanh measure little more than 1.5 square metres.

And while the Bond Street pavements are a couple of metres wide, the gap between the stalls in Ben Thanh is barely wide enough for the average person to walk along comfortably.

The market derives its name from its original location on the shores of the Ben Nghe river near the Gia Dinh fort; Ben means river and Thanh means fort. It was destroyed in 1859 when the French invaded the city, then called Saigon. It was rebuilt and, in 1899, moved to its current location.

Vietnam's urban property sector has been booming since the mid-1990s with the transition from a communist to a market economy. Foreign investment has driven annual economic growth in recent years to almost 8%.

Mr Townsend said the property boom had mostly been confined to Ho Chi Minh City and the capital, Hanoi, where two-bedroom flats sell for as much as £60,000, but prices are starting to go up in other towns, such as Nha Trang, Da nang, Hai Phang, Vung Tau and Cantho.

"Vietnam is now on the radar screen for all the south-east Asian property companies," he said. "The only people who aren't looking are the British and the Americans."

Data from Vietnam's stock exchange shows that many of the listed companies have diversified into property.