Closing the Millennium Gaps is about further building upon the impressive progress achieved in improving human well-being in Viet Nam over the past decade, while at the same time broadening the development process to include those being left behind, and reversing widening socio-economic disparities. In short, this report is about achieving the MDGs for all Vietnamese people, girls and boys, women and men, ethnic minorities and Kinh, and urban and rural people.

Closing the millennium gaps will require substantial investments in capacity building at the provincial and sub-provincial levels to enable effective decentralization of finance and decision making authority. This strengthening of capacities for local solutions will be essential for meeting the real priorities of local communities in a sustainable manner while reaching those in most need. For some of the most isolated poor provinces, there will also be a considerable need in the foreseeable future for supplementing local efforts with a significant increase in equitable and efficient inter-provincial transfers from the central government.

In this context, equity and efficiency of such transfers would be greatly facilitated by an inter-provincial transfer formula anchored in objective needs-based criteria. The efficiency of such transfers needs to be supported by rational incentives that also strongly encourage local initiatives to develop local income, employment  and tax generating activities.

Like last year’s MDG report, this year’s report provides policy makers and decision takers a range of MDG progress indicators and indices by province. This breakdown aims to facilitate inter-provincial analysis and could be useful to help better target resource allocations.  As available data continue to improve, the intention is to further develop and refine such indices to help guide progress towards the full achievement of the MDGs.

This year’s MDG report is also about sustainability. The sad experience of the last fifty years is that many developing countries have experienced extended periods of rapid GDP growth fuelled by access to easy finance, which in turn supported temporary  improvements in social indicators, only to find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly destabilized and engulfed in socio-economic crisis, with major set backs to human well-being.