The Japan Centre for Economic Research (JCER) has predicted that Vietnam will become an upper-middle-income country in 2023, and its GDP will surpass that of China’s Taiwan in 2035.

The JCER recently released a medium-term forecast of Asian economies entitled “Asia in the coronavirus disaster: Which countries are emerging?”, which addresses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and looks at how Asian economies are faring compared with others around the world.

In the standard scenario, JCER assumes that the pandemic is a transient event that will not affect economic structures over the medium term.

Under this assumption, only China, Vietnam, and Taiwan are on track to maintain positive year-on-year growth rates in 2020. 

Vietnam is seen sustaining a growth rate of about 6 percent in 2035 thanks to strong exports. This would propel the Vietnamese economy past Taiwan’s in 2035 in terms of scale, and make it the second-largest economy in Southeast Asia after Indonesia.

Vietnam is poised to achieve upper-middle-income status in 2023, with per capita income headed for 11,000 USD in 2035, according to JCER.

The report also included a severe scenario that describes an outcome in which the coronavirus not only damages today’s economy but also affects urbanisation, trade openness, R&D spending, and a host of other factors, undermining countries’ potential growth rates over the medium term.

In this scenario, the growth of the US, Vietnam, Singapore, and others in 2035 would be significantly lower than those under the standard scenario, largely due to trade blockages. Vietnam’s economic scale at that time is projected to still be smaller than that of Taiwan, JCER said./.