Cristina Fernández, Argentine president-elect, has vowed to restore credibility in the country’s official inflation figures by copying US data-gathering methods, in an attempt to calm fears about government manipulation of statistics.

Official statistics show year-on-year inflation for the first nine months of this year running at 5.8 per cent, and at 8.6 per cent in the past 12 months. But private economists, investors, companies and union leaders say the official figures cannot be trusted because of alleged government intervention at Indec, the national statistics institute.