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Vietnam posts impressive foreign investment numbers
Statistics from the Vietnamese Government’s Foreign Investment Department show direct investment from abroad to be up 13.8% in 2009’s first six months from a year ago, reaching $4.1 billion dollars. The strongly positive foreign direct investment (FDI) flows are particularly significant because they run counter to the global trend.
In May, a UN agency reported that “foreign investment flows to developing countries nosedived in early 2009 as credit-starved companies in the industrialised world cut back on overseas expansion.”
The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) continued that “after holding up relatively well last year, FDI in emerging economies felt the full force of the global economic downturn in the first quarter of this year,” and predicted “further falls in worldwide direct investment flows till the end of the year, with a slow recovery beginning in late 2010 or 2011.”
The Foreign Investment Department, a unit of the Ministry of Planning and Investment, said that enterprises in Korea, Japan and Singapore were the leading sources of new investment in Vietnam. Doctor Nguyen Quang A, head of the private Institute for Development Studies in Hanoi, called the first half 2009 number “beautiful,” and “a good, clear sign that foreign investors continue to regard Vietnam’s economy as very attractive in the long run.”
A recent Financial Times (UK) analysis suggests why the Vietnamese investment climate is proving particularly attractive in hard times for the global economy.
“In the past,” says the FT, “investors have viewed emerging markets mostly as low-cost production bases, but in today’s tough economic environment countries such as Vietnam – which has a population of about 85m – are coming to be seen as potential consumer markets.”
vietnamnet, tn, ft
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