Vietnamese Prime Minister, Pham Minh Chinh recently delivered a speech on the occasion of the 2021 Global Trade in Services Summit. He spoke on the significance of digital transformation in the pandemic era, where all countries are similarly stressed and cooperation in executing digitisation agreements will go a long way in serving everyone. The idea is to enable comprehensive development for all.

Among his proposals, the Prime Minister raised the need for countries to cooperate in advancing the education and training of their population in science and technology, to enable the workforce to adapt to digitisation.

Vietnam itself is poised on the brink of digital evolution as a dynamic developing ASEAN economy with a network of 17 Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with over 60 partners, and is a market of nearly 100 million, most of whom are quickly adapting to digitisation.

In that spirit,  Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh put forth five distinct proposals:

• Countries should make the most of digitisation to speed up the effect the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030
• Buttress international cooperation on digitisation to ensure better cyber security which will also help in fighting existing issues including cyber attacks, privacy, unequal tax obligation and monopoly
• Upskilling and training of individuals so that they are able to evolve as per technology and science
• Using digital technology in trade facilitation to ensure continuity of the supply chain despite the pandemic 
• Strengthening and regulating cross-border e-commerce