More than 700,000 people will join the country’s workforce every year until 2015, an annual increase of 1.5 per cent, according to a report on the country’s labour and social trends.

This makes Viet Nam one of the fastest growing labour markets in Southeast Asia, just behind Indonesia and the Philippines, notes the report released recently by the Institute of Labour Science and Social Affairs.

The economy is thus under pressure to create jobs, a task that could be hard given the current trend of low number of firms registered per capita and the fact most of them are small and medium-sized enterprises with little capacity to create jobs.

During the period from 2000 to 2007, agricultural jobs as a proportion of the total dropped from 65 per cent to 52 per cent, with many workers shifting to the industrial and service sectors.

Cheap labour will no longer provide the country a competitive edge when it shifts from a labour-intensive, export-driven economy to a high-tech, capital-intensive one to climb in the global value chain. — VNS