Economic forecast: Vietnam a star RGM performer in 2013

The top three RGM performers in Asia in 2013 are expected to be China and Hong Kong (8.6 per cent), India (8.5 per cent) and Vietnam (7.1 per cent), said the firm’s quarterly Rapid Growth Markets Forecast.

The report said Vietnam’s 2012 growth would be 5.7 per cent and full-year inflation would be 11 per cent.

The Asian Development Bank, in its Asian Development Outlook 2012 launched April 11, also put the country’s growth at 5.7 per cent this year. Tomoyuki Kimura, ADB country director for Vietnam, said the tight policy to curb high inflation in 2011 also slowed the country's economic growth. He said Vietnam’s average inflation this year could ease to just under double digits.

The Vietnamese government also expects single-digit inflation this year.

Meanwhile, the Ernst & Young forecast said inflation worldwide would fall this year but inflation in India, Vietnam and Egypt is still uncomfortably high, limiting their scope to cut interest rates or provide a boost through government spending.

The report added companies alerted to rising cost factors in China could very usefully look at Vietnam, Mexico and African countries as alternative producers of low-cost manufacturing. However, other RGMs need to look at China and learn from its fostering of small and medium-sized companies that are able to identify and occupy gaps in markets.

Rapid growth markets around the world are proving resilient amid uncertainties and subdued trade flows in the global economy, according to the report. It is a macroeconomic forecast co-produced with Oxford Economics.

Vietnam’s economic expansion decelerated to 5.9 per cent last year from 6.8 per cent in 2010. The economy grew at the slowest pace in three years to 4.1 per cent year-on-year in 2012’s first quarter from 6.1 per cent in 2011’s fourth quarter.

Other predictions

JP Morgan Bank said late March that Vietnam’s annual inflation would slow to single digits by this May and full-year inflation would be 10.3 per cent, quite lower than 18.7 per cent last year.

HSBC said April 4 that the global bank’s growth forecast of 5.7 per cent for Vietnam this year faced significant downside risks even with expected acceleration of growth in the coming quarters, because domestic demand was lower than expected.