Vietnam remains the growth star among Asian economies, at 8.02 this year, according to official figures.

This is not only the fastest growth in the region, but also the highest rate for the socialist republic in a quarter century.

Exports, driven by electronics, shoes and textiles and facilitated by free trade with America and Europe, rose 10.6 percent to $372 billion.

However, Vietnam is facing ever greater challenges, for example in terms of energy supply.

Christopher Hein

Business correspondent for South Asia/Pacific based in Singapore.

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In view of the growing hurdles, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has just warned: “We are neither fickle nor subjective, careless or taken by surprise.

Instead, we have to remain calm and have the situation firmly under control in order to find solutions.” Whether his government and the party have the situation under control is an open question.

Because the specifications are getting thicker and thicker: they range from an overdue tax reform to dealing with state-owned companies, the new billionaires, corruption, the stabilization of the capital markets and the rapid development of climate-friendly energy supplies.

This is what the new investors are asking: a Lego factory, for example, was delayed because the toy manufacturer wanted to at least partially offset its climate-damaging plastic production by using green energy sources - but these are not available in sufficient quantities.

Investors are queuing

Nevertheless, investors are still queuing because they see a certain balance to their China production in the Mekong country next to the Malaysian Penang or, in the longer term, Indonesia.

The manufacturing industry will grow by 8.1 percent in 2022, said Nguyen Thi Huong, head of the statistics agency.

The donors are currently looking in particular at the central part of the elongated country.

Also in view of the dangerous real estate crisis in China, Chinh also pushed for a stabilization of housing construction in the overheated market: "The government has taken steps to make housing more affordable.

But companies need to change too, because they can't continue to charge high prices and pump most of their money into the luxury segment," he said.

The current growth rate is well above the target range of 6 to 6.5 percent set by the government.

In 2021, the pandemic had pushed growth down to just 2.58 percent.

In the coming year, however, the export nation is also likely to feel the effects of a feared global recession.

The government's statistics office also warned on Thursday of the consequences of "global political and economic uncertainties and challenges".

In the fourth quarter, the growth rate had already cooled down to 5.92 percent from 13.71 percent in the previous quarter.

After the end of the sometimes tough quarantine, trade grew by almost 20 percent over the year as a whole.

However, consumption could also cool down because the inflation rate has already risen to almost 5 percent.

The central bank has meanwhile raised the key interest rate to 6 percent,