Vietnam is warmly welcoming and eagerly looking forward to more supports for its poverty reduction programs and economic growth targets from Robert B. Zoellick, newly-appointed World Bank President who will visit Vietnam from August 5-7.
The tour to Vietnam is in WB President’s tournament to some other Asian Pacific countries, including Japan, Australian and Cambodia next week in addition to his trip to Sub-Sahara Africa, Europe and Latin America last month with the aims to learn the bank’s role in promoting trade development.
Escorted by Vice President Jim Adams and other high-ranking officials, Mr. Zoellick is schemed to meet with Vietnam’s high-ranking officials, business leaders and members of civil society organizations, according to a press release issued by the bank's office in Vietnam on Thursday.
The WB official will travel to rural areas in Vietnam to see various development projects and meet local people who are benefited from the bank’s support to secure land rights for the poor and improve livelihood via better rural roads, irrigation works and basic education and health services in Vietnam.
“For Vietnam to achieve its own goals of trying to become a middle-income country-by about 2010 is its goal-it's going to have to expand areas like the banking sector, some of the good governance, environment, social protection, some of the legal institutions,” Zoellick said.
Vietnam is a success story for other countries in the third world to follow, Zoellick noted.
The WB official, who was once the U.S trade envoy in Vietnam, has played significant roles in helping Vietnam become a WTO member-country.
Robert Zoellick told reporters that his pending discussion in Australia for an Asia Pacific finance ministers' meeting will focus on “what’s been achieved, which remains a big question marks in the system” after a decade of a financial crisis erupted in Thailand in July 1997.
Established in 1945 to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, the WB has provided over $20 billion (€14.5 billion) a year for projects such as building dams and roads, improving education and fighting disease in developing countries including Vietnam.
Zoellick was President George W. Bush’s former top trade envoy and No. 2 diplomat at the State Department.
The World Bank’s sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, organized a rescue during the 1997 crisis with multibillion-dollar emergency loans but was later criticized for imposing overly austere policies in exchange for them.
Zoellick's Asia-Pacific trip will start on July 30 and finish on Aug. 9. (Vietnam & World Economy, Vnexpress)
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