Vietnam to announce 25.4% upward GDP revision this month

[HANOI] Vietnam will officially announce the revision of the size of its gross domestic product (GDP) for the 2011-2017 period later this month, the head of the General Statistics Office said on Monday.

The GSO said in August it would revise up the size of the GDP by 25.4 per cent for the period to meet international norms and better reflect the real size and structure of the economy.

"We have submitted the revision results to the Prime Minister and it will be made public later in November," Nguyen Bich Lam, director of the General Statistics Office (GSO) told Reuters.

"The upward revision for the 2011-2017 period is still 25.4 per cent," Mr Lam said.

Mr Lam said the announcement will be made later than previously scheduled "because we need more time to calculate the impacts of the revision on macroeconomic indicators".

In its statement in August, the GSO said recent strong private sector growth had not been fully reflected in its statistical data, and that experts at the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations were helping the with the revision.

Vietnam has been targeting annual GDP growth of 6.5-7 per cent for the 2016-2020 period, and last year it grew by 7.08 per cent, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which had put GDP at more than US$240 billion in 2018.

Last month, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said Vietnam's GDP growth is expected to exceed 6.8 per cent this year, backed by robust exports and foreign investment.

REUTERS