CONVERSATION ON VIETNAM ECONOMIC REFORM

On July 25^th Dr. Tran Dinh Lam - Director of Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies - had a meeting with a delegation of students from NanYang Technological University (NTU), Singapore to discuss the Vietnam economic reform. 

During the meeting, Dr. Lam addressed how Vietnam changed from a planned economy to a market-oriented one. As of 2018, Vietnam has achieved many successes since the country’s reform: GDP growth rate reached 6.8% in 2017, poverty rate reduced from 58% to 9.8% in 2016. However, several perpetual issues are still the challenges for Vietnamese government to solve. These include educational system, infrastructure, corruption, government debt, low-quality labor... and especially, government policy and structure.

According to Dr. Lam, one method is to emulate Singapore’s development model. He praised the effort and role of prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore government in policy-making and soft-power utilization which have facilitated the legal procedures to attract foreign investment, encourage private sector businesses and ultimately boost economic growth rate.

Students from NTU also pointed out some comparative advantages of Vietnam such as food’s diversity and quality - natural endowments that Vietnam can exploit. Besides, they mentioned the variation of growth rate among different regions.

On the societal aspect, many pressing issues are now of greater concerns as Vietnam becomes a middle-income country. Infrastructures, volume of traffic, pedestrian’s awareness are some of the prominent ones they witnessed when living in Vietnam. They also proposed some solutions to these issues like tightening the license-granting procedures to prevent careless drivers from participating in the traffic. 

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