The national teleconference between the Government and localities (Photo: Tran Hai)

Addressing a national teleconference between the Government and localities on April 5, he highlighted some encouraging results in the Q1 socio-economic situation.

As there remain numerous difficulties in Q2 and beyond due to the global context’s impacts, internal problems, and unpredictable issues, ministries, sectors, and localities should show stronger determination, efforts, and self-reliance to perform tasks fruitfully, the PM requested.

He asked for continued implementation of the COVID-19 prevention and control programme, the socio-economic recovery and development programme, and the Government’s resolutions on production, business, and innovation facilitation.

The Government leader demanded more efforts to maintain macro-economic stability, control inflation, boost public investment disbursement, tackle obstacles hindering production and business, capitalise on free trade agreements to expand export markets, promote the domestic market, and strictly deal with smuggling, trade frauds, and wrongdoings related to real estate, bonds, the environment, the stock market, and fuels.

Ministries, sectors, and localities were also told to foster digital transformation and climate change response; speed up economic recovery, especially in tourism; carry out vaccination as scheduled, particularly for children aged 5 - 11; step up the fight against corruption and negative phenomena; and increase communications to win over public support and combat fake news.

According to a report at the meeting, the country's GDP growth in Q1 was estimated at 5.03 percent compared to the same period last year. The consumer price index was kept under control, at 1.92 percent. The disbursed foreign direct investment stood at around 4.42 billion USD, up 7.8 percent year on year and also the highest figure in five years.

Meanwhile, total trade revenue rose 14.4 percent to 176.35 billion USD, with exports up 12.9 percent and imports up 15.9 percent. The labour market has also recorded many encouraging signs.

The number of new COVID-19 cases has continued soaring in most of localities, mainly due to the BA.2 sub-variant of the Omicron variant. However, thanks to the wide vaccination coverage and the focus on caring for high-risk groups, the severe cases and the fatality rate have fallen sharply.