New Vietnamese government to face four major challenges

The ongoing first session of 13th National Assembly (NA) of Vietnam on Wednesday approved the government cabinet personnel in new term, including four deputy prime ministers and 22 government members.

The new Vietnamese government will be facing with four major challenges, including instability of the macro-economy, corruption, wealth gap between the rich and the poor, and the interest benefited by special groups, analysts said.

Instability of the macro-economy is manifested through inflation, trade deficit, public debt and poor management of the state-owned corporations. Over the past four years, Vietnam’s economy had been in an instable situation. In 2008, the country faced to the worst skyrocketing inflation and trade deficit, which tends to return this year.

Vietnam’s consumer price index (CPI) in July rose by 1.17 percent against June, bringing the country’s CPI to 22.16 percent rise year-on-year, highest among Asian countries. Meanwhile, Vietnam’s growth is expected to slow to six percent this year as authorities tighten monetary policies and cut government expenditures to bring inflation under control.

During his inaugural speech on Wednesday, re-elected prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung said in the immediate time, the government will focus on drastically and effectively containing inflation, stabilising the macro-economy, removing difficulties for production and businesses, ensuring security and social welfare.

“To stabilise the macro economy, the government has set forth basic measures, but they had not yet been strictly and comprehensively implemented, resulting in low effectiveness,” Vietnamese senior economic expert and policy consultant Pham Chi Lan said.

Preventing corruption is the second challenge faced by the government. Although the Anti-corruption Law had been enacted since 2006 in Vietnam, corruption is now happening at a deeper and broader scale which leads to the huge loss in property. The scandal of Vietnam Ship-building Group (Vinashin) and the debt crisis between PetroVietnam and Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) made the country lose trillions of dong.

Corruption will waste the country’s natural and human resources and threaten economic growth. It will also erode the Vietnamese people and the foreign investors’ confidence, Lan said.

The increasing wealth gap between the rich and the poor also becomes a challenge and a “headache” for the government and national assembly. According to the recent biennial survey by the Vietnamese Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, the income and consumption gap between 25 percent of the richest and 25 percent of the poorest is increasing. In 2006, consumption gap between those two groups was six folds, in 2008 with eight folds, and in 2010 with nine folds. In property, the gap may rise to thousand folds.

The existing of special group interest results in the widening wealth gap. “The interest of some localities or branches should also be re-adjusted correctly and in line with the country’s development. Poor coordination among state offices, including irresponsibility and low spirit of the local or branch’s leaders would lead to difficulty in solving the interest among those groups,” Lan said.

It is not easy for the government to solve the problem. But once clearly defined its way and with its firm spirit, the government will know whose interest should be protected or not, the analyst said. – Xinhua

Tags: Vietnam economic, Vietnam economic growth, Vietnam economy, Vietnam economy 2011