Vietnam’s economic growth may accelerate this year, enabling the Southeast Asian country to attract investment from overseas as the global economy rebounds from the worst recession in more than six decades.
The country will grow between 6.5 percent and 7 percent this year, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Ho Chi Minh City. The economy expanded at a 5.3 percent pace last year.
“Vietnam has become an attractive and safe destination for international investors,” Dung said. “Foreign investment capital has constantly risen over the years in Vietnam and plays an important role in the economic success of the country.”
Economic growth may gain further momentum to between 7 percent and 8 percent from next year to 2020, he said.
The global recovery from last year’s recession has boosted Asian exports and lifted economic growth from Thailand to Malaysia.
“After the strongest crisis since the Second World War, Asia has been surprisingly very stable and is bouncing back very fast,” Frans Muller, a member of the management board of Germany’s Metro AG, the country’s largest retailer, told the same conference.
Earlier this month, Dung asked the central bank to implement measures to reduce rates and help the country achieve economic growth of 6.5 percent this year.
Hanoi has tried to bring down borrowing costs that climbed to as high as 20 percent this year after a link was severed between the central bank’s benchmark and commercial banks’ interest rates.
Meanwhile, Hanoi plans to sell more foreign-currency denominated bonds, Deputy Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem said in an interview yesterday in Ho Chi Minh.
“Our bond-sale plan depends on which projects we need to invest in, their effectiveness, and the level of risk involved,” he said.
Vietnam sold its first foreign currency bond in 2005, raising US$750 million in an offering in which demand exceeded supply by more than six times. In January, the Vietnamese government sold US$1 billion of 10-year debt.
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