VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam has more than 110 super-rich people, as announced by the World Bank. The super-rich include state agency officials. No one knows the actual values of their assets.
The country’s average income per capita, as announced by the Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung at the Vietnam Development Partner Forum in late 2013, is $1,960 per annum.
If one needs to have at least $30 million to be a super-rich person, then a Vietnamese would have to work for 17,500 consecutive years to be recognized as super-rich.
According to the General Statistics Office, in 2012, Vietnamese earned an average of VND2 million a month (every urbanite earned about VND3 million, while the average income per capita in rural areas was a little over VND1.5 million).
On average, every person spent VND1.6 million a month (VND2.3 million in urban and VND1.3 million in rural areas). As such, every person could save VND400,000 a month.
Statistics from 2013 will be made public when the survey on Vietnamese households’ living standards is completed.
In September 2013, a Swiss bank reported that there were over 200 super-rich people in Vietnam. Super rich people, as defined by the bank, are those who have assets valued at $30 million and higher.
The bank counted the number of Vietnamese super-rich based on Vietnamese deposits in banks.
BCG, an US-based consultancy firm, said in its latest report that the number of rich and middle-class people would double by 2020. It predicted that Vietnam would have 30 million rich and middle-class people by 2020, triple the number of Myanmar’s.
There is one super-rich person for every one million people in Vietnam. Vietnam ranks second among Southeast Asian countries with the sharpest increases in the numbers of super-rich, according to the World Bank.
The income of 40 percent of the country’s poorest people has increased by nine percent over the last 20 years. This, as assessed by the World Bank, showed that Vietnam has gained achievements of equitable growth.
Analysts all believe that Vietnam has more than 110 super rich people, but they are not sure how many they are. This is because the figures about individuals’ assets are not made public in Vietnam.
The World Bank and other organizations can only count super-rich people by considering their stock assets or deposits at banks.
They do not have information about other assets, including cash in family coffers or houses, because in many cases, the houses are under other people’s names.
Super-rich people include state agency officials, who receive monthly salaries of only several million dong from the state budget. As for these officials, “salary” does not mean “income”. Most of the assets of the rich officials come from unofficial sources.
Chi Mai