Vietnam’s 20-year economic reform review

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Vietnam Social Science Institute and the Sweden International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) held a workshop concluding 20 years of Vietnam’s innovation on June 30 to July 1.
Participating the workshop was over 200 local and foreign market researchers sitting down to assess achievements and draw lessons for the development of the Vietnamese economy in future.
Chair of Vietnam Social Science Institute Do Hoai Nam said that the most highlighted success that Vietnam has gained after its 20-year implementation of the doi moi reform process is that the country has integrates in international economies more deeply, transformed to a market economy.
“In the next five years, Vietnam needs to try its best to synchronously expedite three targets: ensuring the continuous operation of the market economy; building a social security system and forming the supervision mechanism to ensure publicity, transparency, equality of all economic subjects,” said Nam.
To create a breakthrough in the economic development, Vietnam needs focus its manpower and financial resources to create “steel punches” on economic development for key economic areas and then other leading economic areas to together develop, said Nam.
Chief representative of UNDP Ryan Jordan said that over the past 20 years, Vietnam has made many big changes to paint its brighter picture with a rapid economic growth speed and clearly improved living standard. The world knows the doi moi reform process of Vietnam as one of the examples on the success of the economic transformations. However, to sustain economic growth, Vietnam needs to endeavour its best to settle poverty issues in remote and mountainous areas in the country.
PhD Robert Hunter Wade, from the London Economics University (Britain) said that the result of a survey on economic transformations in 150 countries throughout the world shows that 61% of them remain stationary, 39% of states have little economic transformations and only 12% was strong economic transformations, including Vietnam.
This shows the great progress of Vietnam after 20 years of implementing the doi moi reform process and brings back an economy with a high and rapid growth. Most particularly, Vietnam has maintained its sustainable economic growth rather than it had to endure pressures of the growth too much, resulting in the situation of borrowing foreign loans to create efficiency for the economy and leave debt burdens behind for next generations.
“However, I also warn that the competitive capacity of Vietnamese companies remains low and state-owned enterprises still play a too clear role to the economy while the private economic sector remains developing very slowly,” said Wade.
Wade added “In my opinion, Vietnam cannot apply the trade liberalism like United Kingdom, the United States. Vietnam must choose a suitable economic development path for itself. The point is that the Vietnamese government must balance the policies between protectionism and competition, but to my view, I pay top attention to competition because it is a miraculous bullet to prevent and combat corruption issues”.

 

Category: Economy