A journey to raise the aspirations

Binh Duong has a broad vision, overcame the glory of the past to gain the current success in construction of industrial parks and investment attraction. Since its re-establishment, Binh Duong has taken a right step according to a development logic. It is to rise up and change the level and until now Binh Duong has done very well.

Binh Duong New City.

To surpass targets spectacularly

A brief overview of Binh Duong development logic: From the first days of its re-establishment, Binh Duong did not choose to rely on land advantage to promote agricultural strengths; focused on catching investment waves in new generation of industrial parks to soon become an industrial province with modern orientations; made efforts to quickly modernize and shift strategic objectives to modern urban construction, service-commercial and industrial complexes.

In 3-4 recent years, although the modern urban portrait has been shaped, Binh Duong has upgraded that goal into "smart city", based on digital technology, building innovation ecosystem – not only for Binh Duong new urban but for the whole province.

Many people said that Binh Duong is next to Ho Chi Minh City and this is easily considered a development advantage. However, from the perspective of Binh Duong, with a lower and slower starting point, perhaps the unfavorable aspect seemed to be more dominant. Binh Duong's possibility of playing role of a suburb to serve the inner city development, and cannot make breakthrough to overcome was very large.

Although at present, Binh Duong has not surpassed Ho Chi Minh City, over the past 20 years, Binh Duong has successfully made efforts to develop and escape from a low starting point, establishing a new status and position. Using the word "spectacular" to talk about the development achievement of Binh Duong, I think it is not too much. With a radical market thinking and the approach of "going beyond" rather than the effort to "imitate, persevere and follow", what Binh Duong achieved are worthy.

There is a fact that during the development journey, Binh Duong always raised aspirations; always set higher strategic goals for its class, and always strive to surpass the achieved goals. That is why, over the past 20 years, Binh Duong has always moved on and on. Currently, the population size of Binh Duong has nearly doubled compared to 20 years ago; while the GDP per capita, from a very far distance, is now quite close to the level of Ho Chi Minh City.

From these development results, it is possible to draw lessons from Binh Duong's experience: Always keep the vision of keeping up and moving with the times; not complacent with the gained achievements, though these are great, with every step; being persistent with the orientation of developing an open market and international integration. But Binh Duong's success also came from laying all its experience and tireless efforts for development on the basis of: Always maintain and consolidate the agreement in awareness, will, and action, first of all in the provincial leadership.

I would like to add that Binh Duong's development experience has always been meaningful and necessary - not only for Binh Duong but also for me, for other localities and for designing development policies at national level. How come? Simply because from the development experience of Binh Duong, many valuable lessons can be drawn - on how to organize, manage the transition to a market economy in the context of institutional constraints and limited conditions; on vision, how to select the priority goals, how to cultivate aspiration and determination...

Reaching the global level, effectively mobilizing strength from businesses

The mobilization of business strengths for the development of the province has created important effects. For several decades, the famous slogan of Binh Duong has been "the government serves businesses". With this slogan, Binh Duong quickly built a strong enterprise force.

Currently, Binh Duong is rising to a new level, with the most important criteria of modernity and development level. That means Binh Duong is setting its goals of global-level development and rise to the level of the times. With that goal, the thinking of the development force of Binh Duong also changed: Cannot continue being strong with small and medium-sized enterprises, with low technology, but need to build modern production - technology chains, with the pillar of powerful economic corporations in terms of finance and technology.

At the 2nd Asia Horasis Meeting 2019 held in Binh Duong, the message was clearly conveyed and received strong support not only from the Vietnam Government but experts, international and Vietnamese enterprises.

Binh Duong is shaping a right development strategy, heading towards a smart city, welcoming the wave of Industry 4.0. Therefore, the ability to gather powers and resources, including the core force, which are strong economic groups, high technology, and a large number of SMEs and startups, as well as institutes, universities, is very large. This is the basis for the next success of Binh Duong.

What impressed me most about Binh Duong development was Becamex IDC - a State-owned enterprise plays the role of a development driving force for the whole province. Becamex IDC is the most important factor that shaped the development portrait towards modernity for Binh Duong.

In the project Binh Duong Smart City, the great role of Becamex IDC is clearly proved. Therefore, I believe in its bright prospects. And I expect, Binh Duong right now should incubate fundamental businesses such as Becamex to continue promoting the strength of businesses, as an attraction for SMEs "satellites" to develop, especially in global supply chain building process.

Of course, this does not mean to underestimate the role of other factors in the success of Binh Duong. But I am talking about the unique, unusual and impressive feature of Binh Duong in the development journey. At least for me alone.

In the next journey, Binh Duong should pay attention to what to preserve and improve the achieved results, heighten the success of the past and the present:

One is persevering in the direction of modern market development - opening up - integration. The other is not to be detached from the principle of advancing at the same pace with current era, building chains, participating in global production networks. Thirdly, attaching importance to the intensive development of science and technology, the intellectual human resource, and encouragement of innovation. Fourthly, advancing along with the southern key economic region, and the quadrilateral "Ho Chi Minh City - Binh Duong - Dong Nai - Ba Ria - Vung Tau".

Written by Associate Professor - Dr. Trần Đình Thiên, Former Director of Vietnam Economic Institute.- Translated by Ngoc Huynh