Vietnam is determined to achieve an economic growth rate higher than the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s estimate of 2.7% for this year, the highest in Southeast Asia, according to Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the meeting. Source: VGP.

Low economic growth is not an option, while high growth would help create jobs, reduce poverty and ensure social security, Phuc said at a monthly government meeting on May 5.

According to Phuc, as Vietnam has progressively contained the Covid-19 pandemic with no new local Covid-19 infection in 19 consecutive days, the priority now should be to boost economic activities, Phuc added.

Therefore, there is an urgency to kick-start the social-economic recovery as soon as possible, particularly construction projects in the field of transportation, while still focusing on efforts to combat potential spreads of the pandemic, Phuc stressed.

Among measures to help boost economic growth, Phuc urged government agencies to ensure the realization of the public disbursement target of VND700 trillion (US$29.78 billion) for this year.

At a time when the country is striving to maintain high economic growth, Phuc noted it is essential to keep inflation under the 4% target, saying “a high inflation rate would reduce the impacts of growth.”

In its latest World Economic Outlook released in April, the IMF projected the global economy in 2020 to contract 3%, a significant downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, making this current Covid-19 crisis “the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis,” stressed Gita Gopinath, IMF Economic Counsellor.

Growth in advanced economies is projected to drop 6.1% this year. Emerging market and developing economies with normal growth levels well above advanced economies are also projected to have negative growth rate of -1% in 2020.

Nevertheless, the Asian region would serve as a driving force for global economic recovery in 2021 with China coming strong at a 9.2% GDP growth rate, India with 7.4% and the ASEAN–5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) recording an average growth rate of 7.8%.