Vietnam's Workforce in 1996-2005 Revived: Surveys

 

In the past 10 years, there were 10 official and four experimental surveys on the size and structure of workforce and employment in Vietnam. The General Department of Statistics has collected data from some 71,000 households in 3,550 areas, 50,000 enterprises and organisations and 500,000 workers.

 

According to Dr. Le Duy Dong, Vice-Minister of MOLISA, the survey provided specific data and a highly reliable evaluation of Vietnamese workforce. The data serves as the basis for the development of the labour market nation-wide. The survey led to the following conclusions:

 

The workforce in Vietnam continues its fast development with an average of 2.5 per cent a year in 2001-2005, or one million workers a year (4.5 per cent in urban area and 1.9 per cent in rural area).

 

The size of trained workersincreases year-on-year, from 6 million in 2002 to 11 million in 2005, or 1.8 times that of 2000 and increase of 12.9 per cent a year.

 

Workforce structure in 2005 by professional skills: untrained, trained/equivalent, vocational graduates, university and higher education graduates.

 

The current economic structure is: 24 million people working in agriculture-forestry-fisheries (56.8 per cent), 7.7 million in industry-construction (17.9 per cent), and 11 million in services (25.3 per cent). The workforce continues to increase in industry-construction and services and is decreasing in agriculture.

Workforce structure in 2005 by economic sector: agriculture-forestry-fisheries, industry-construction, service.

 

The labour allocation in economic sectors: Vietnam has 4.4 million people working in the State sector (10.2 per cent), 38 million working in non-State sector (88.2 per cent) and 0.7 million in foreign invested sector (1.6 per cent).

 

The labour allocation in regionsthough changing in a positive direction, remains to see shortfalls: slow in the North-West and Central Highlands, and fast in densely populated areas in the South-Eastern part of Vietnam.

 

The unemployment rate in urban areas has decreased from 6.4 per cent in 2000 to 5.3 per cent in 2005, or over 0.2 per cent a year, attaining the target of 5.5 per cent.

 

According to the evaluation of Dr Le Duy Dong, over the past 10 years, positive developments have been recorded in training, employment, working time in rural areas, workforce restructuring and salaries, achieving all the targets set by the 9^th Party Congress, except in the number of trained workers. There remain however, certain problems. First, the quantity, percentage, quality and structure fail to meet the ever-increasing demand, especially in key-economic regions. Second, there remain job pressure on the young workforce, especially in urban areas with high unemployment rates (13.3 per cent). Third, there is still a shortage of skilled workers while many trained workers continue to be unemploymed (including high school and university standards). The big gap between urban and rural workforce is causing serious difficulties to the industrialisation and modernisation process as well as international economic integration.