Vietnam - It’s very difficult for analysts to access data about public debts

VietNamNet Bridge – When a group of researchers implemented the project on surveying the public debts of Vietnam to the order of the National Assembly’s Economics Committee in July 2012, they complained that it is very difficult to approach the material sources to fulfill the report.

The official source of information about foreign debts incurred by Vietnam has been provided only by the Ministry of Finance’s Foreign Debt Bulletin. However, economists say the bulletins, which come out once every six months, cannot be updated with the latest information.

The latest bulletin, No. 7, only showed general figures about the foreign debts until the end of 2010. Meanwhile, the statistics about domestic public debt, and the debts incurred by state owned enterprises, could not be found in the bulletin.

As such, the figures about the foreign debts incurred by state owned enterprises have been collected by the researchers from the reports the Ministry of Finance presented at the National Assembly’s sessions, and the reports about the outstanding loans by the State Bank of Vietnam.

Therefore, the figures could be different, if they are calculated in different times.

The researchers have pointed out that the loans by state owned enterprises from foreign sources guaranteed by the government reached 4,642.74 million dollars in 2010. However, the problem is that the figure has never been released by the Ministry of Finance before.

Researchers have every reason to complain about the difficulties to access database sources. Even the State Audit finds it difficult to get information about public debts.

In a report released on July 18, 2012, the agency pointed out the problems of the Ministry of Finance in the public debt management and the information exposition.

The State Audit believes that the Ministry of Finance has not exposed information sufficiently about the implementation of the programs and projects using the government’s loans and the loans guaranteed by the government, about the public debt balance and debt structure.

Meanwhile, the State Audit emphasized that the information must be made public as requested by the Public Debt Management Law.

The management over the loans the Ministry of Finance (MOF) gets for re-lending to domestic enterprises has been cited as a typical example showing the problems in the statistical works.

MOF informed the State Audit that the foreign loans for re-lending had reached 11.2 billion dollars by the end of 2010.

However, MOF has also reported that 8.4 billion dollars have been re-lent by the end of the year. Meanwhile, it has not mentioned the remaining sum of 2.8 billion dollars. No one can find the answer to the question how has the huge sum of capital has been used.

Problems have also been found in the management over government-guaranteed loans. By the end of 2010, when the Public Debt Management had taken effect for one year already, necessary legal documents guiding the implementation of the law still had not come out. Therefore, a lot of necessary steps of the procedures were skipped.

The report by MOF submitted to the State Audit shows that the total sum of money borrowed by commercial banks under the government’s guarantee had reached 26,065 billion dong by the end of 2010. The gross sums of money MOF advanced to pay for the projects were 1,675.6 billion dong in 2010 and 2,436.8 billion dong in 2011.

Meanwhile, the Bulletin No. 7 released by MOF in July 2011 showed that the government-guaranteed debts had increased from 750 million dollars in 2005 to 1.031 billion dollars in 2006 and then to 4.642 billion dollars in 2010. This means that the figures do not have any relation to the figures submitted to the State Audit.

Compiled by Thu Uyen

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