Hanoi (VNA) – Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung reported on the Government’s and his performance during the 2011 – 2016 term to the National Assembly deputies at the ongoing last meet🔯ing of the 13th parliament ꦐon March 22.

He said the Cabinet and he focused on controlling inflation, stabilising the macro-economy, and ensuring sustainable growth. The annual gross domestic product growth rate averaged 5.9 percent during the period, reaching 6.68 percent in 2015 – the highest since 2008. They pushed ahead with simultaneous economic restructuring and growth model changing and initially succeeded in improving the economy’s productivity, quality, effectiveness and competitiveness. To build a socialist-oriented market economy, the Government focused on creating an equal competition environment, increasing administrative reforms, rapidly developing skilled manpower, fundamentally and comprehensively reforming education, and building synchronous infrastructure – especially in transport and facilities in big cities. It spent an adequate amount of time on building draft laws, ordinances and guiding documents so as to better ensure their legality, unanimity, transparency and feasibility. The Government also consolidated its apparatus, addressed the overlap or shortage of the State management over specific areas, and fine-tuned regulations of specialised agencies at the province and district levels, the PM said. In the report, he acknowledged certain shortcomings in the Cabinet’s performance such as its modest ability to make predictions, which led to setting some unrealistic socio-economic development targets, and developing some mechanisms and policies that were unfeasiable and lacked vision. He also pointed out flaws in ensuring the State budget collection and spending balance, managing public debt, the use of loans in several projects, expanding domestic and foreign markets for Vietnamese goods, and fighting smuggling and counterfeiting. Based on the successes and failures over the last five years, PM Nguyen Tan Dung concluded that it is critical to swiftly institutionalise the Party’s guidelines, the Constitution and the State’s laws, and set the national and people’s interests as the ultimate goal. He stressed that it is of paramount importance to make precise assessments of the reality, set forth appropriate targets, tasks and solutions, and win the public’s support. The more challenges occur, the more efforts must be made on raising social welfares and people’s living standards, particularly in rural, ethnic minority and disadvantaged areas. Meanwhile, people’s right to self-mastery has to be promoted, and people should be considered the centre of, the main resource to achieve, and the target of development, he added. Concurrently, national defence and security must be strengthened to safeguard independence, national sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is also necessary to optimise domestic strength, proactively integrate into the world, attract and capitalise on external resources, and raise Vietnam’s stature in the international arena, the Cabinet leader noted in the report.-VNA