Skilling Up Vietnam : Preparing the Workforce for a Modern Market Economy
Education has played an important role in making Vietnam a development success story over the last 20 years. In the 1990s and early 2000s Vietnam experienced rapid economic growth. The accelerated growth was driven predominantly by productivity inc...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Publication |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/06/19705606/skilling-up-vietnam-preparing-workforce-modern-market-economy http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18778 |
| Summary: | Education has played an important role
in making Vietnam a development success story over the last
20 years. In the 1990s and early 2000s Vietnam experienced
rapid economic growth. The accelerated growth was driven
predominantly by productivity increases that came in the
wake of a rapid shift of employment from low-productivity
agriculture to higher-productivity nonfarm jobs.
Vietnam's economy began to industrialize and modernize.
Poverty fell dramatically. And education played an enabling
role. Vietnam's committed effort to promote access to
primary education for all and to ensure its quality through
centrally set minimum quality standards has contributed to
the country's reputation for having a young,
well-educated workforce. Results from the 2012 Program for
International Student Assessment (PISA) and new evidence
from an adult skills survey presented in this book show that
literacy and numeracy among Vietnam's youth and young
urban adult workforce are strong and exceed those of even
some wealthier countries. Despite its clear progress,
Vietnam is facing new challenges. The pace of economic
growth and the reallocation of jobs away from agriculture
have slowed in recent years. Rather than productivity
improvements, capital investments have become the main
source of economic growth, but this model is not sustainable
for ensuring continued rapid economic growth. The size of
its workforce is still expanding, but its youth population
is shrinking, which means that Vietnam cannot continue to
rely on the size of its workforce for continued success.
Instead, it needs to focus on making its workforce more
productive and on alleviating skills barriers to labor mobility. |
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