Vietnam Today

Speaking at the 3rd annual Industry 4.0 Summit on December 6, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said that Vietnam’s internal resources are a basic and decisive element in its long-term strategy, while external resources are important for breakthroughs in technology, capital, and management science. He added that the existing difficulties are only temporary and that Vietnam’s economy remains stable.

A pressing problem for Vietnam today is to identify solutions for sustainable economic recovery and development in the post-pandemic period while supporting long-term growth drivers promoting the process of industrialization and modernization, economists said at the 3rd annual Industry 4.0 Summit.

According to Dr. Nguyen Si Dung, former Vice Chairman of the National Assembly’s Office, Vietnam has only taken a “half step” into a model of a State that creates policies for development. The fact that it is short of talented civil servants and breakthrough inventions has prevented it from becoming a “dragon”.

Vietnam appears to be recovering quite slowly from the pandemic, and without a sufficiently large support package will fall behind. Many economists have therefore proposed economic support packages for 2022 and 2023 totaling VND445.76 trillion ($19.5 billion), or nearly 5.5 per cent of GDP.

Vietnam is currently enjoying what is called a “golden” population structure, with about 55 million people in the workforce. Only 24.5 per cent are trained, however, and this is one factor behind Vietnam’s workplace productivity remaining quite low. Developing skilled human resources has become an important foundation for the economy to grow sustainably and in-depth.

According to Vietnamese economic analysts and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the country needs to introduce policy packages for economic recovery and development, especially as inflation is unlikely to break out. Most support packages introduced so far involve tax extensions or deferrals, etc., and account for just 1-2 per cent of GDP.