HANOI, DECEMBER 6 (Engineering Daily) -- Vietnam has considered infrastructure is one of the most vital factors for economic development and foreign investment attraction. Despite difficulties, especially impact of global financial crisis, Vietnam has still prioritized infrastructure development as a prerequisite for socio-economic development and promotion of industrialization-modernization in the country.
According the Head of International Corporation Department, MOC, Vietnam is now rated as one of two countries with the highest completion rate (90%) of commitments in the overall roadmap of implementing ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) while the average rate is 82.1% for other countries. Vietnam has made the commitment in terms of regional economic integration and active participation in the ASEAN economic cooperation activities in a comprehensive manner, including transport sector.
Recently, the government has approved the program to enhance the transport connectivity within ASEAN to 2020 and vision up to 2030. Accordingly, the Vietnamese road technical standards are required to conform to the ASEAN’s road standards. For the maritime sector, enhancing the competitive capacity of the national fleet is considered and the large scale tourism fleet is gradually developed to connect Vietnam with important tourist attractions in the world. For the airline industry, focus on improving the capacity of the domestic airlines for competitiveness of ASEAN single aviation market is necessary, striving to participate effectively in the bigger aviation markets such as ASEAN - EU, ASEAN - China, ASEAN - India and ASEAN - Korea. Strengthening the participation of the private airlines and cheap airlines is also continued.
In recent years, Vietnam has actively implemented commitments on transport connectivity within ASEAN and has achieved some positive results. In term of infrastructure connectivity, Vietnam has basically completed the commitment to develop the road network of ASEAN; completed the identification of 18 highways with a total length of 4,237 km, brought 8 ASEAN roads into the territory of Vietnam; completed the upgrade of 1,317 kilometers of "less than grade III" up to grade-III road as per ASEAN standards since 2004; has been upgrading the North-South railway line in railway project Singapore - Kunming; connected inland waterway transport with ASEAN through Cambodia; basically completed the construction, upgrade and improve the capacity of Vietnam's seaport in ASEAN seaport network.
However, in order to achieve ASEAN integration objectives set out, tasks for ASEAN member countries in general and Vietnam in particular will be even more difficult. According to the Ministry of Transport, in addition to the internal problems of a country's resources to develop logistics systems, there are other regional challenges, such as disparities in levels of development, the differences in the laws of each member nations for transport and logistics services. The Minister also pointed out: "to ensure a good connectivity, we must firstly develop transport infrastructure and management capacity itself. The external is a continuation of the internal. The stronger internal, the better external. Therefore, implementing transport infrastructure investment is under the Party Congress Resolution’s aims, as well as the Platform of Nation Building proposed, in association with the scheme of transport connectivity in the ASEAN region".
