Dung: There’s no time like the present

Answering General Electric’s questions about infrastructure development, Dung said socio-economic infrastructure development was a priority with special attention paid to transportation, electricity, information technology and telecommunication infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure include highway and high-speed train systems and subway networks in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

“Vietnam also pays special attention to developing its air transportation system in order to meet investment, trade and tourism demands. The Vietnamese aviation market has continuously grown from 15 to 18 per cent per year for the past 20 years,” he said.

In late 2007, Vietnam signed up to buy more than 50 aircraft from Boeing and Airbus.
Dung said Vietnam also wanted to speed up electricity development since demand had increased from 12 to 15 per cent a year. Vietnam wants to double its electricity generation capacity from 14,000 megawatts to 28,000MW by 2010.

“The Vietnamese Government has actively directed funds into developing these fields and also encouraged and created favourable conditions for all economic sectors, both domestic and foreign, to invest in infrastructure,” said Dung.
He said infrastructure and human resource development was one of the five major tasks the government was focusing on.

“We understand that if Vietnam doesn’t deal with the infrastructure issue quickly, it will be difficult for the country to attract and keep foreign investment.”
In reply to the questions from The Economist Intelligence Unit about the slowdown of Vietnam’s equitisation process, Dung said Vietnam continued to take active steps and complete its equitisation programme.
“Vietnam has cut the number of wholly state-owned enterprises from 6,000 to 1,400, of which only 104 are big corporations,” said Dung. He added that Vietnam would equitise all the remaining 104 state-owned corporations by 2010 and some would be listed on overseas stock markets.

“The government welcomes foreign investors to buy shares and take part in Vietnam’s stock market.”
He confirmed that foreigners were permitted to own up to 49 per cent of equitised companies, with the exception of banks which had a 30 per cent limit.
“This is a necessary step to make sure of the stability for Vietnam’s economy as well as of foreign investors’ benefits,” said Dung.

Regarding anti-corruption, Dung said he was aware that corruption was a challenge to Vietnam’s development as well as to the existence of the government.
He said improved legal institutions, administrative reform and the civil servants’ salaries would increase the fight against corruption.

“Increasing salaries and improving living standards for civil servants is crucial to a successful fight against corruption. However, this is also very difficult work because of the size of Vietnam’s economy and state budget are all still small,” said Dung.

Charles Goddard, The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Asia-Pacific editorial director and co-chairman of the roundtable, said that as a newly emerging economy, Vietnam had many opportunities and challenges.
However, with the strong government determination, he believed the nation faced a bright economic future. He said that more than half of the foreign investors taking part in the roundtable had actively registered their participation in the roundtable forum.
“This is the clearest indicator showing the trust the world is giving to Vietnam,” said Goddard.