The event, held by the MoIT and the European Trade Policy and Investment Support Project (MUTRAP), aimed to seek feedback on a draft plan on Vietnam’s industrial restructuring for 2017-2020.
Le Tien Truong, General Director of the Vietnam National Textile and Garment Group, says that many data on the textile and garment industry in the draft are incorrect such as labour productivity, added value or import. Therefore, the plan’s reliability remains modest and it needs overhauling.
The plan says labour productivity must be raised by 5 percent to improve competitiveness but it is simply a target. The plan does not mention any processes to realise that target.
Meanwhile, Vietnam currently ranks fifth among the countries with highest labour productivity in fibre and textile production. It follows China in terms of labour productivity in garment manufacturing.
Nguyen Tue Anh, Deputy Director of the Central Institute for Economic Management, stated the MoIT’s plan needs to further clarify the bottlenecks and their causes in the development of industries so as to devise effective solutions.
Director General of the MoIT’s Planning Department Duong Duy Hung confessed that it is necessary to have a clearer plan which must point out major bottlenecks and detail restructuring processes in order to focus resources on right areas, thus creating more substantive improvements.
Industrial production value in Vietnam has surged by nearly 3.5 times it makes up about 31-32 percent of the country’s GDP, according to the MoIT.In recent years, electronics, textile-garment and footwear have become key exports, accounting for over 60 percent of the country’s total export revenue. However, MoIT Deputy Minister Cao Quoc Hung commented that, the country still ranks 101st among 143 countries in terms of the per capita added value in processing and manufacturing industries. Its industrial labour productivity is still outpaced by developed nations and other countries in the region. This is a worrying problem when Vietnam is now just in the initial stage of industrialization and so the draft plan on industrial restructuring has been built to promote substantive industrial restructuring, he noted.
