World Bank President Robert Zoellick on Monday praised Vietnam as a "tremendous success story" in fighting poverty but said institutional reforms were needed as it seeks middle-income country status. Zoellick, on his first Asia trip since taking office last month, vowed to push for additional bank lending to the communist country, which he said offered development lessons that could be applied elsewhere in the world.
Vietnam - a low-income country of 84 million people that saw economic growth of 8.2 percent last year - has been hailed for sharply reducing poverty from nearly 60 percent in the early 1990s to less than 20 percent now.
"One aspect that is particularly impressive is that, in addition to high growth, the government has tried to expand the benefits throughout the country, including the rural poor," said Zoellick after a trip to a countryside project.
But he also cautioned that Vietnam now "needs to build the institutions for the future," which included "improving governance, transparency, rule of law, financial systems." Vietnam, a one-party communist state that joined the World Trade Organisation in January, has introduced scores of new laws to become WTO-compliant and is seeking to reform institutions such as the central bank.
But many foreign investors have complained of red tape, corruption and a lack of legal certainty and transparency in the rules for doing business. Zoellick said he and Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung discussed how the bank could help Hanoi become a middle-income country by 2010, with per capita gross domestic product of more than 1,000 dollars a year.
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