Better Investment Outcomes in Viet Nam through Increased Public Investment Management Efficiency

Viet Nam's long-term goal is to attain high-income status by 2045. Achieving a modern, industrialized and resilient economy with higher living standards will depend on well-designed government policy interventions, combined with well targeted, efficient and effective public expenditures. Among the latter, public investment will play a critical part in creating the environment for wealth creation and social welfare improvements. However, it will not just be the volume of public investment that counts but also the quality, and this will become more important as time goes by. As diagnostic studies have shown, the quality of public investment is currently compromised by fragmentation, duplication and inefficiency. Overcoming these difficulties will be a major challenge in meeting Viet Nam's development aspirations, which forms the broader context for the current Technical Report. In addressing the challenge of improving the quality of public investment, the Technical Report homes in on four potential hurdles that will need to be overcome: i) a complex and overlapping legal and regulatory framework for public investment management; ii) inefficiencies in managing the portfolio of ongoing and planned investment projects through the medium-term investment plan; iii) the absence of a standardised methods and documents for assessing project quality prior to a funding decision; and iv) obstacles to mobilising official development assistance (ODA) in a timely way. The analysis in the Technical Report seeks to examine these four hurdles in depth and propose solutions