In his address at the forum themed “Accelerating economic institutional reform, strengthening resilience and enhancing the competitiveness of Vietnam’s economy”, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung pointed out the major challenges in 2014, especially the complicated developments in the East Sea which have threatened stability and all-round development in Vietnam.

However, the country has made remarkable achievements in such fields as economics, politics, culture, social affairs, national defense, security, external affairs, international integration and improved business climate.

PM Dung underscored that in order to enhance the competitive capacity of the national economy next year, the Vietnamese Government would focus on six major tasks. These include continuing to stabilize the macro economy, accelerating international integration and economic restructuring, transforming growth model, improving the national economy’s competitiveness, making greater efforts to ensure social justice and welfare, and implementing signed economic and trade agreements, while carrying out uniform measures to combat corruption.

The PM expressed hope that international partners would continue to support Vietnam in realizing the set targets for 2015 and the following years: "Vietnam will focus on improving its legal systems and market economy institution to ensure citizens’ rights in accordance with the Constitution. Vietnam will continue to mobilize and take full advantage of all possible resources, strongly reform its administration, and improve the business environment to create favorable conditions for people and businesses to boost production. The government encourages the development of private businesses, especially the SMEs. Vietnam attaches great importance to ensuring people’s freedom and democratic rights and improving the national market economy institution in accordance with the 2013 Constitution, considering them major solutions to enhancing Vietnam’s economic competitiveness."

The WB Country Director congratulated the Vietnamese Government on its accomplishments in 2014, suggesting Vietnam should focus on making reforms and improving the competitiveness of the national economy, and ensure social stability: "The suggestions about providing a broad platform for sustained macro stability going forward remained important, and recognizing and increasing close links between macro stability and the structures and institutional reforms. One other theme comes out very clearly is the need for strong implementation. We all commended the government for the very good pieces of legislation that come into place during the course of the year but implementation is key. Inter-agency coordination will reduce the burdens on private sectors as things are implemented and sharing consistency and predictability on implementation, in particularly transparency in the process of implementation with clear mechanisms to continue to evaluate the implementation success and performance."