'If everything is sharp, there will be no sharp point!'

Many opinions said that it is necessary to eliminate the gap between foreign-invested enterprises and domestic enterprises at the workshop "Vietnam's Economy: Growth Drivers and Promotion Solutions" recently organized by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences in Hanoi.

There are two economies in one country.

Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue said he was quite concerned about opinions that Vietnam has an economic imbalance, forming two separate development areas: FDI and domestic.

Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue speaks at the conference - Photo: Nhat Bac

"We say we must be selective about FDI investors, choose FDI with high technology, environmentally friendly, with a value chain ready to connect with domestic enterprises, making domestic enterprises stronger. However, the problem is how to connect when in the past these two areas have not been connected and developed evenly," Mr. Hue commented.

Director of the Vietnam Economic Institute Nguyen Dinh Thien analyzed that the gap between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Income (GNI) shows a gap between the "external part" and the "domestic part", in which the "external part" is increasing while the "domestic part" is decreasing.

"It seems we are more concerned with finding ways to attract FDI to increase economic growth than with domestic enterprises," Mr. Thien commented.

Economist Pham Chi Lan assessed that the Government's efforts have only partially resolved the difficulties for businesses, but she said that domestic businesses are facing many difficulties.

"Current business conditions are mainly focused on domestic enterprises. Vietnam still focuses on taking care of foreign enterprises more than domestic enterprises. This causes us to lose many resources," said Ms. Lan.

Ms. Lan said the results of the field survey at private enterprises showed that there was inequality between domestic private enterprises and the FDI sector.

"For every four newly established businesses, three businesses withdraw from the market, and the impact of these businesses withdrawing from the market is greater than what newly established businesses bring," Ms. Lan said, emphasizing: "The business environment is still the biggest problem for domestic businesses today."

Everything that is sharp has no sharp point.

Director of the Vietnam Economic Institute, Tran Dinh Thien, suggested that we should not chase growth year by year and consider it as a driving force to create new growth momentum.

Mr. Thien suggested that GDP should only be considered as a guiding indicator to avoid putting pressure on the Government, while emphasizing that the approach to growth in Vietnam is skewed, only leaning towards quantity.

Economist Le Dang Doanh believes that the measure of growth needs to shift from resource exploitation and cheap labor to innovation and reliance on technology.

Dr. Doanh believes that the necessary indicators to measure and evaluate growth include technological innovation, knowledge economy, number of internationally recognized patents from Vietnam...

Mr. Doanh assessed that currently, localities only focus on GDP index and do not focus on technology, environment, and innovation indexes, which are not taken seriously, even though these are key factors in promoting growth and improving growth quality...

In response to conflicting opinions about the spectacularly high economic growth figures in the third quarter of this year, Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue said: "The Government also wants to determine a system of targets to strive for and implement, as a basis for monitoring the Government's operations on growth, unifying awareness and action."

According to Mr. Hue, there is currently a lack of indicators to assess growth quality. "Without criteria, many people's self-assessments will be contradictory. Statistical experts do not trust statistics because people are not provided with complete relevant data."

According to T.Ha/tuoitre