The gap between the rich and the poor in Vietnam has become wider in the past few years, a trend that will worsen if the government continues to tolerate the wrongdoings of state officials and grant privileges to wealthy and interest groups. According to a report from the government’s General Statistics Office (GSO), the rich was 9.2 times as rich as the poor in 2011, up from 8.9 in 2008, the online Dat Viet newspaper reported last weekend. The data showed that the rich spent six times, 3.8 times, and 131 times as much as the poor on education, healthcare, and recreation, respectively. The stark contrast between the rich and the poor is more evident when looking at the current situation of people living the rural areas. Over the past years, Vietnam has lost roughly 200,000 hectares of agricultural land for industrial projects, golf courts, and large apartment and villa projects. Such change has made direct impacts on rural residents, causing nearly 2.5 million rural workers to lose their jobs and many farmers to have nothing to work on for three to four months a year. As a result, people in rural areas across Vietnam are having a hard time finding jobs, securing good education for their children, accessing clean and safe water in addition to other basic infrastructure as many public and private services are not geared toward serving the poor. The inequality has even appeared in state-funded fields which aim to provide high-end services for the rich, making the whole gap worse, said Nguyen Sy Dung, deputy head of the National Assembly’s Office. Earlier this month, private-wealth consulting firm Wealth-X and the Swiss-based bank UBS estimated that the number of ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNW) or “super rich people” in Vietnam in 2012 rose by 14.7% on year. The firm’s data showed a group of 195 surveyed UHNW owned combined assets of $20 billion. (www.baodatviet.vn [1] Sept 15)
