Vietnam has made good progess in Human Development in the 2016-2020 period, according to the latest report conducted by the General Statistics Office.

Vietnam makes progress in human development in 2016-2020. Photo: Nguyen Viet Thanh/ILO

"Vietnam's Human Development Index (HDI) increased but slowly. The country currently ranks 7th out of 11 countries in Southeast Asia," Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, Deputy Director of the Population and Labor Statistics Department at General Statistics Office told a press conference to announce the Vietnam Human Development Index 2016-2020 on January 6.

The General Statistics Office also pointed out that all provinces and cities of the first level of administrative division have achieved higher HDI in 2020 than in 2016. In 2020, although no locality was classified in the highest HDI group, there were also none in the lowest HDI group according to UNDP's classification criteria.

It is worth highlighting 13 locations in 2016, 14 in 2017, 18 in 2018 and another 24 in 2020 rose to the higher HDI groups (second and third).

The report showed that HDI disparities among localities gradually narrowed. In 2020, the average HDI value of 10 best performing localities reached 0.773, an increase of 2.71% compared to 2016. Meanwhile, the average HDI value of 10 localities in the lowest group was 0.626, an increase of 5.02% and 1.85 times higher than the average growth rate of the 10 top tier localities.

Therefore, the average HDI difference of the 10 highest scoring localities compared to the 10 lowest-scoring ones decreased from 26.38% in 2016 to 23.61% in 2020.