The Politburo assessed that the pandemic has holistic and profound impacts on all countries around the world and is still evolving complicatedly. The global economy slipped into serious recession while the Vietnamese economy, with high degree of openness and extensive international integration, has been  strongly affected due to disruption of value chains and trade flows.

The pandemic has caused direct impacts on sectors like tourism, education, and production. Many enterprises have gone bankrupt, dissolved, suspended or reduce operations and the GDP only grew 3.82% in the first quarter this year, the lowest rate in the last decade.

As the COVID-19 outbreak was first experienced in Viet Nam, leaders of the Party and State and the whole political system drastically embarked on containing the pandemic with support and solidarity from the people and the army, bringing about positive outcomes. Viet Nam has pushed back and controlled the pandemic.

At the same time, a number of support policies have been put in place to help enterprises and people overcome this hard time. Socio-economic activities have been resumed while the economy has shown positive signals of recovery.

However, the evolution of the pandemic remains complicated and may last long with unforeseeable implications, which requires Viet Nam to continue focusing on fighting the pandemic and adopting both short-term and long-term solutions to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic.

Major orientations

Against such backdrop, the Politburo believes that it is imperative to fully tap the domestic market, maintain marco-economic stability, control inflation and ensure livelihood for our people, especially the poor and vulnerable groups.

The country will strive to realize goals set for 2020 and create a business enviroment that is conducive, attractive and competitive enough to lure domestic and foreign investment sources.

It is necessary to clarify opportunities and challenges in order to design proper measures to create fresh growth motives, accelerate reform process and restructure the economy.

Special policies need to be adopted to strenthen internal strengths, competitiveness, self-reliance and independence of the national economy.

Shorts and long-term tasks

The country will continue implementation of mechanisms and policies, especially financial, monetary and social security ones to support people and businesses, particuary small- and medium-sized enterprises to survive through the pandemic, and tax dues in the sectors hit hardest by the pandemic.

The salary increase for public servants, public employees and those working in the armed forces and pension for retired people, which was planned to apply since July 1, this year, will be deferred [in a bid to mobilize resources for other urgent tasks].

The Politburo asked for accelerating disbursement and raising the effectiveness of State investment capital and for ground-breaking new and mega investment projects.

In the long-run, the Politburo called for comprehensively reforming and perfecting institutions and national governance capacity, beefing up administrative procedure reform and simplification with a focus on fixing investment bottlenecks, and stepping up formation of a legal framework for new business models and for digital transformation.

More incentives should be adopted to support potential sectors to participate deeper in value chains while more efforts should be made to focus on recovering and developing supply chains in order to lessen dependence on a single market.

The country will foster the development of digital government, digital economy, and system of national, regional and local-level innovation centers while promoting the role and strengths of the key economic regions./.