Vietnam’s economic recovery accelerated over the last six months on the back of resilient manufacturing and a robust rebound in services. GDP growth is forecast to surge from an estimated 2.6 percent in 2021 to 7.5 percent in 2022, while inflation is projected to average 3.8 percent over the year, a World Bank economic update for Vietnam released today says.
The latest projection was made on the back of resilient manufacturinig and strong rebound in services.
Despite recent shocks and uncertainties, the Vietnamese economy is on recovery path after experiencing sharp contraction in the third quarter last year.
Statistics revealed that Vietnam’s population has an average 10.2 years of schooling, second only to Singapore among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries.
Vietnam’s human capital index is 0.69 out of a maximum of 1, the highest among lower middle-income economies.
However, low skills relevance of the university graduates put the country in the bottom third of the 140 countries listed in the 2018 Competitiveness Index on skills relevance of university graduates.
A World Bank skills and enterprise survey published in 2019 also said that 73% of sampled Vietnamese firms report difficulties in recruiting employees with leadership and managerial skills, 54% with socio-emotional skills, and 68% with job-specific technical skills.
Focusing on tertiary and higher education, the WB’s report recommends reforming the education system to improve quality and access, and thus provide the necessary skills to the population.
Reforms to Vietnam’s higher education system could help support development objectives, the report says.
“International experiences have shown that higher worker productivity can be achieved by investing in the education system, as an important part of a basket of investments and reforms. A competitive workforce will generate much-needed efficiency for Vietnam in the long term.”/.
Source: VNA