Vietnam gains $4B boost from ADB

A four-year partnership between the Asian Development Bank and Vietnam, backed by nearly $4 billion in loans and grants, stands to help pump the Southeast Asian country with the type of infrastructural support it needs to ward off what are considered to be substantial challenges, in spite of a steadily growing economy.

ADB said Thursday (Aug. 9) its renewed partnership with Vietnam will center on agriculture and natural resources, education, energy, finance, transportation, water supply and other municipal infrastructure — areas that will help the country build climate resilience.

In a July 2012 joint assessment report, ADB and the Agence Française de Développement found Vietnam is expected to require $150 billion to $160 billion in infrastructure investment over the next 10 years. But, as the report shows, government and official development assistance “are widely acknowledged as insufficient to meet Vietnam’s huge infrastructure needs.”

The private sector also remains a rarely utilized method of yielding jobs and projects in Vietnam. Public-private partnerships have been “very limited” and government approval and support have been “uncertain,” the authors of the report write. But the government is now said to be developing a formal legal and logistical framework for enabling PPPs in Vietnam.

This marks the third of several major international funding and political boosts for Vietnam over the past few months: The World Bank announced in March that it will be giving $552 million in loans and credit to support infrastructure and agriculture projects in Vietnam. Three months later, the Asian country signed an investment and trade agreement with the European Union.

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