Vietnam should place top priority on implementing tight monetary policies, said the research team for the Vietnam Economic Annual Report 2011.

This suggestions was made at a conference in Hanoi to announce report on May 17. The meeting was jointly held by the University of Economics and Business (UEB) under the Vietnam National University-Hanoi (VNU) and the UK Department for International Development .

The report, entitled “The Economy at a Crossroad”, is published as Vietnam is faced with numerous development challenges after a decade of growth.

In the first year of the current five-year strategy, the Vietnamese economy faces macro instability such as increasing inflation and trade deficits, as well as problems in restructuring state-run businesses.

Cutting public investment on construction projects should be associated with developing new investment models such as public-private partnerships (PPP) and Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) models.

Nguyen Duc Thanh, director of the UEB Centre for Economic and Policy Research proposed raising deposit interest rates and considering increasing of compulsory reserves to control the supply of money.

(VOV)