Vietnam's state-owned car fleet to be cut 30-50 pct

The fleet of Vietnam's state-owned cars serving officials will be cut by 30-50 percent, or about 12,000-20,000 cars, by 2020, according to a directive by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Friday.

The directive is part of efforts to considerably reduce public spending, of which buying state assets accounts for 20 percent of annual state budget, reported local Vietnam Investment Review (VIR) online newspaper.

The cut will not be applied to mountainous, remote areas and the islands, said the directive.

Statistics by Vietnam's Ministry of Finance (MoF) showed that the country now has nearly 40,000 state-owned cars, and the cost to run them has reached 13 trillion Vietnamese dong (582 million U.S. dollars) per year.

Phuc asked the MoF to quickly submit to the government a plan for deputy ministers and officials at the same level to receive taxi fare subsidies instead of offering them state-owned cars. Endit