VN manages to keep trade deficit under US $20 bil.

Despite the rise, the Ministry said that Việt Nam can still keep trade deficit under US $20 billion this year thanks to several positive reasons.

First of all, the prices of Việt Nam's import staples like crude oil, petrol, steel, steel ingots and fertilizers are going down.

Secondly, domestic demand in the rest of the year largely depends on the import volume of July and August. Meanwhile, some imports in August sharply increased over the same month last year, such as steel up by 36%, steel ingots 46%, fertilizers 5%, and petroleum 13%.

The last reason is that the Government's recent solutions, such as canceling ineffective projects, reducing public investment, promoting thrift practice and anti-prodigality, will pull down the demand for some commodities like materials and equipment.

The MIT said that it will closely cooperate with other ministries to drastically implement tariff and non-tariff, macro and micro-economic measures to boost exports and reduce import excess.

Accordingly, the import of goods which are not encouraged will be tightened by reducing loans given to consumer-goods enterprises, raising import tax, special consumption tax and valued added tax.

Many other non-tariff measures are also applied, including strengthening quality inspections, labelling imports, checking some specific imports at the stipulated customs stations.

Promoting export is another effective way to control trade deficit.  Việt Nam exported US $43.3 billion worth of commodities for the first eight months. The country expects to gain the total export turnover of US $65 billion in 2008, an increase of 34% over 2007.