Vietnam’s economy grew 8.18 percent in the first half of 2026, up from 7.63 percent a year earlier. Prime Minister Lê Minh Hưng told the country’s business community on Saturday, July 18, that it still is not fast enough. Speaking at the first meeting between his new Government Standing Committee and business leaders, Hưng laid out six priorities meant to close the gap between that number and the double-digit growth rate his government wants sustained through 2030.
Buried in the second of those six priorities, better access to capital, land and investment resources, is the detail that will decide whether the target is real: a specific pledge to widen credit access for small and medium enterprises. Those firms make up 98 percent of Vietnam’s registered businesses. Government data released since Resolution 68, the private sector policy Hưng’s plan largely restates, show the money still moves mostly toward big companies.
Six Fixes for an Old Complaint
Saturday’s meeting followed a government review of 53 groups of concerns and recommendations that businesses had already filed, many of them still unresolved. Hưng ordered ministries and local authorities to close out anything within their own legal power immediately and to push anything needing new legislation up the chain for approval.
“All legitimate difficulties and obstacles raised by businesses will be followed through and addressed, ensuring the Government delivers on its commitments with tangible and effective results,” Hưng said. The six priorities he set for ministries, sectors and local authorities were:
- Institutional reform, accelerating legal changes and administrative simplification so rules stop overlapping and enforcement stops varying by province.
- Resource access, improving how businesses reach capital, land and investment funding, with particular attention to small and medium enterprises.
- Cost reduction, cutting logistics and compliance costs while pushing trade offices to chase actual contracts and export orders instead of counting activities.
- Innovation and workforce, funding research, artificial intelligence, green technology and stronger links between universities and businesses.
- Enterprise linkages, tying state owned, private and foreign invested companies into shared supply chains.
- Policy discipline, holding ministry and local leaders personally accountable for delays or for inventing requirements beyond what the law allows.
Every official response to a business complaint must now be posted publicly, on the government portal, on the relevant ministry’s website and on the site of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, so businesses and the public can judge for themselves whether an issue actually got fixed.
The Banker Who Inherited a Growth Problem
Hưng is new to the job. The National Assembly elected him prime minister on April 7, replacing Phạm Minh Chính for a 2026 to 2031 term, making him, at 56, the country’s youngest prime minister since 1955, according to the country’s youngest prime minister since 1955, as the South China Morning Post put it. He spent nearly his whole career at the State Bank of Vietnam, rising in 2016 to become its youngest ever governor before moving into party leadership roles.
That background cuts both ways. His macroeconomic record as central banker drew praise, but the Van Thịnh Phát fraud case, one of the largest financial scandals in Vietnamese history, took shape on his watch as governor, a fact the SCMP flagged as a mark against his supervisory record even as it called him a technocrat suited to a harder phase of development. A political analyst who spoke to Luật Khoa Magazine described the new leadership arrangement as pairing a very strong general secretary with a very weak prime minister, noting Hưng lacks the local governance experience of his predecessors. That may explain why Saturday’s meeting leaned so heavily on personal accountability language: a technocrat with a thin political base needs visible results.
Can Vietnam Actually Hit Double Digits?
Not easily. Vietnam’s gross domestic product grew 8.39 percent in the second quarter of 2026, its fastest second quarter pace since 2011, and 8.18 percent for the first half. To hit the government’s full year target of at least 10 percent, the economy now needs roughly 11.9 percent growth in the second half, a jump economists call steep even with strong momentum.
Public investment, one of the government’s own growth levers, is lagging. Nationwide disbursement had reached only 35.5 percent of the annual target assigned by the prime minister as of June 30, with 25 central agencies and 11 localities running behind the national pace. Vietnam also posted a trade deficit of 16.65 billion dollars in the first half after imports of production inputs outran exports, and the World Bank reclassified the country as an upper middle income economy effective July 1, a milestone that raises expectations even as it changes little about the near term math.
Where Economists Disagree
- Nguyễn Thị Hương, director general of Vietnam’s National Statistics Office, called growth remains vulnerable to external shocks the year’s biggest risk given how open Vietnam’s economy is to outside disruption.
- Nguyễn Văn Điển, head of the Faculty of Political Economy at the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics Region II, argued the target is still reachable if broken into smaller sector level gains rather than treated as one massive push, telling Thanh Niên he still sees a positive scenario.
- Kim Eng Tan, managing director for Asia sovereign ratings at S&P Global Ratings, put Vietnam’s steady state growth forecast at just 6.7 percent annually over the next three years, well under half the government’s stated ambition.
Three credentialed views, three different numbers, all published within weeks of each other.
A Resolution Vietnam Already Signed
Much of what Hưng announced Saturday was not new. In May 2025, the Communist Party’s Politburo passed Resolution 68, a document that named the private sector the most important driving force of the economy and set a decade of targets some Vietnamese commentators have nicknamed a second Đổi Mới, after the 1986 reforms that opened the country’s economy. The overlap between that resolution and Saturday’s six priorities is close enough that the speech reads less like a new policy than a renewal notice.
| Metric | Resolution 68 Target by 2030 | Reported Status in Mid-2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Active private enterprises | 2 million enterprises in the economy | Just over 1 million active enterprises of all types as of June 2026, versus under 1 million private firms when the resolution passed |
| Private sector share of GDP | 55 to 58 percent | Roughly 50 percent today |
| Private sector annual growth | 10 to 12 percent a year, outpacing the wider economy | Whole economy grew 8.18 percent in the first half of 2026 |
| Compliance cost reduction | 30 percent cut in administrative burden | Still in progress under the six priorities announced Saturday |
Hưng himself framed the moment as a shift in what needs fixing. “Institutions are no longer the economy’s bottleneck. The challenge now is to continue improving them so they become a stronger foundation for development,” he said, adding that the National Assembly would hold both extraordinary and regular sessions later this year with institutional reform high on the agenda.
Ninety-Eight Percent of the Business Registry
Vietnam had more than one million active enterprises by the end of June, with combined registered capital exceeding VNĐ30 quadrillion, roughly 1.1 trillion dollars at current exchange rates. The whole business sector, state owned, private and foreign invested combined, contributes more than 60 percent of GDP, 55 percent of state budget revenue and employs over 17.6 million workers, according to figures Hưng cited Saturday. Almost all of those enterprises are small or medium sized.
Credit to that group has grown fast on paper. Outstanding loans to small and medium enterprises hit outstanding SME loans topped $138.7 billion by December 2025, up 21.73 percent year on year, as banks shifted toward lending based on cash flow and value chain participation rather than collateral alone.
But Lê Duy Bình, chief executive of the research firm Economica Vietnam, said the benefit has been concentrated mainly among large enterprises, with many micro and small firms yet to see much change. DACE, an organic farm produce exporter, is one example: its director said the company could not fully use a government interest rate subsidy meant to ease borrowing costs, because commercial rates for smaller exporters still run above 10 percent. Nguyễn Văn Thân, chairman of the Vietnam Association of Small and Medium Enterprises, put it plainly. “Support mechanisms are timely, but in many places, their real impact is minimal,” he said, noting policies are updated regularly but implementation lags. Vietnam counts nearly 98 percent of its enterprises as SMEs account for 98% of enterprises, according to Nhân Dân, the Communist Party’s official newspaper.
New Strings Attached to Foreign Money
Foreign direct investment implemented in Vietnam reached 13.03 billion dollars in the first half of 2026, up 11.2 percent year on year. Hưng’s speech signaled that pace matters less to the government now than what that capital does once it arrives. He said FDI should shift from prioritizing quantity to quality, with greater weight on technology transfer, localization and workforce development, and instructed ministries to strengthen supply chain links between foreign firms and domestic suppliers rather than treating foreign investment as a self contained enclave.
Resolution 68 already builds a mechanism for that shift. Large foreign backed projects must now submit a local procurement plan before approval, a condition that did not exist for most of Vietnam’s prior FDI boom years. For multinational manufacturers that came to Vietnam chiefly for low cost assembly, that is a materially different ask than the one they signed up for.
A Public Scorecard on the Government’s Portal
Hưng said the government would move “from dialogue to decisive action, from commitments to concrete results,” and that success would ultimately be measured by whether businesses experience lower compliance costs, shorter processing times and greater confidence in Việt Nam’s investment climate. He acknowledged, in the same breath, that state owned enterprises have yet to fully realize their potential, that private firms remain dominated by small and medium players with limited capital and technology, and that foreign invested firms still show weak links to domestic suppliers.
Every one of those weaknesses points back to the same 98 percent of the business registry that Resolution 68 already promised to help. Whether Saturday’s six priorities move faster than last year’s resolution did is now a question the government has committed to answering in public, one posted response at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Lê Minh Hưng become Vietnam’s prime minister?
The National Assembly elected him unanimously, with all 495 participating deputies voting in favor, at the first session of its 16th term on April 7, 2026. He took the oath of office the same day, pledging loyalty to the constitution before beginning a five year term.
What is Vietnam’s Resolution 68 on the private sector?
Resolution 68-NQ/TW is a Politburo document issued on May 4, 2025, that named the private sector the country’s most important growth driver and set targets through 2030. Some Vietnamese commentators have nicknamed it a second Đổi Mới, referencing the country’s 1986 economic opening.
How many household businesses operate in Vietnam outside registered enterprises?
Roughly five million household businesses operate alongside the country’s registered enterprises, according to government backed estimates. Vietnam has separately committed to phasing out the flat tax regime for these household operations by 2026 to encourage formal registration.
How will businesses know if their complaints to the government were resolved?
Every official response now has to be published in three places at once: the national government portal, the website of whichever ministry handled the issue, and the site of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, so businesses can check the outcome without a direct follow up call.
Why does Vietnam want its private sector to grow faster than the whole economy?
Because raising the private sector’s share of GDP from around 50 percent today to Resolution 68’s 55 to 58 percent target by 2030 mathematically requires that sector to expand faster than the national growth rate for several straight years.
