UNDP: Viet Nam in the High Human Development category

"Human development continues to be a focus of Viet Nam’s development strategy, and we have seen very sizable gains over the past decades,” said UNDP Resident Representative Ramla Khalidi.

The UNDP Resident Representative made the assessment on the occasion of the publishing of the 2023/2204 Human Development Report (HDR), titled “Breaking the Gridlock: Reimagining cooperation in a polarized world on March 14.

In the 1990s when UNDP introduced the HDI, Viet Nam was at the relatively lower end of the ranking, but now Viet Nam is in the middle of the ranking, having made consistent progress over the past 30 years.

Viet Nam's HDI value for 2022 is 0.726, positioning it at 107 out of 193 countries and territories. Between 1990 and 2022, Viet Nam's HDI value increased from 0.492 to 0.726, an improvement of nearly 50 percent.

Viet Nam ranks 91st out of the 166 countries in the Gender Inequality Index, which considers inequality across three dimensions of reproductive health, empowerment and the labor market.

“Viet Nam has done well in some respects, for example access to education and labor force participation, however a persistent gender division of labor reserves more stable, highly paid jobs for men, and women still account for a small share of leadership roles in Government, the National Assembly and in the private sector,” she said.

The report reveals a troubling trend: the rebound in the global Human Development Index (HDI) – a summary measure reflecting a country’s Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, education, and life expectancy – has been partial, incomplete, and unequal.

The report highlights that deglobalization is neither feasible nor realistic in today’s world and that economic interdependence remains high. It points out that no region is close to self-sufficiency, as all rely on imports from other regions of 25 percent or more of at least one major type of goods and services.

The HDI is projected to reach record highs in 2023 after steep declines during 2020 and 2021. But this progress is deeply uneven. Rich countries are experiencing record-high levels of human development while half of the world’s poorest countries remain below their pre-crisis level of progress.

Globally inequalities are compounded by substantial economic concentration. As referenced in the report, almost 40 percent of global trade in goods is concentrated in three or fewer countries; and in 2021 the market capitalization of each of the three largest tech companies in the world surpassed the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of more than 90 percent of countries that year./.