Vietnam to Launch Action Plan to Keep Population at 100M by 2020
The government of Vietnam will launch late this month a five-year action plan on controlling the birthrate in a bid to keep the country’s population not exceeding 100 million by 2020, the government said on its website.
The plan will focus on maintaining one or two-child families to give children better care and curbing gender imbalance in order to improve the population quality for the economic growth, the government said.
The National Population and Housing Census 2009 showed that Vietnam’s population hit 85.846 million people by April 1, 2009 with the population growth at 1.2% per annum between 1999 and 2009.
The Southeast Asian country has 47.74 million people at working age from 15 to 64, meaning the country is in golden population structure period as the number of people at working age nearly doubles the dependent ones.
However, Vietnamese workforce is low qualified, resulting in low work efficiency, local experts said.
The government’s move is aimed to improve the labor quality in a bid to reduce the current unemployment rate at 4.6% in urban areas and 2.25% in rural regions.
The government also asks the Ministry of Health to improve public healthcare to reduce the rate of patients and raise the lifespan. (www.chinhphu.vn)
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