Vietnam to develop private sector into economy's important impetus: PM

HANOI, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said here on Wednesday that Vietnam will continue strongly developing the private sector into an important impetus of the economy.

The prime minister made the statement at the Vietnam Development Forum 2017 themed "Leveraging Productivity Growth for Sustainable Development," with the participation of over 300 delegates from international organizations, development partners, private sector and ministries and agencies.

He outlined some key measures to further enhance productivity, create leverage for sustainable development of the future, including creating a comprehensive competitive environment, further improving the efficiency of resources utilization, continuing to strongly develop the private sector to become an important impetus of the economy, taking the initiative in international integration, promoting internal resources to overcome challenges and effectively exploit the opportunities from the free trade agreements that Vietnam has been negotiating to participate in, and firmly maintaining social and political stability.

The prime minister also pointed out the Vietnamese economy's shortcomings, including slow improvement in quality of growth, and lower labor productivity.

The country director for the World Bank in Vietnam, Ousmane Dione, shared similar view. In the last five years, and following the global recession, Vietnam has achieved a commendable growth recovery. However, a continuing trend of weak productivity growth remains concern, Dione stated.

"Vietnam's average labor productivity growth rate is about 4 percent. This compares to rates above 7 percent for China and 5 percent for (South) Korea when these countries were at similar levels of development as Vietnam is now," he said.

The forum's participants suggested a policy framework for Vietnam growth path, including making full use of comparative advantage of high quality, low cost factors, and new incentives such as market competition, policy certainty, as well as the movement of factors such as labor and capital.

The participants also recommended that Vietnam should focus on getting the incentives right to promote efficient resource allocation, with the promotion of effective market institutions, including factor markets such as land and capital, and a modern regulatory environment. Enditem