Vietnam hopes to lure overseas scientists home
Updated
Vietnam has announced a multi-million dollar program aimed at luring Vietnamese scientists living abroad back home. The Ministry of Education and Training says it hopes to target some 300,000 Vietnamese graduates and post-graduates, living in countries like Australia, the United States and Britain.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speaker: Dr Adam McCarty, economic and labour market analyst, Mekong Economics, Hanoi
MCCARTY: You have, I don't know something like two million Vietnamese living overseas, and they're basically Australians, Americans, Canadians, French. So it's something to be tapped into, and if you can get them to come back they're fully qualified technicians in Australia or America, they speak Vietnamese, it's a great resource in the same way that Australia looks overseas to get skilled labour to come to Australia.
PODGER: Which are the sectors in Vietnam that are suffering the most from the brain drain, if you like, of university graduates moving abroad?
MCCARTY: It's pretty across the board need for skilled people because Vietnam's growing so rapidly, and there's a sort of tendency from the Vietnamese authority side to look at the hard sciences and the physical sciences and IT and technology and so on. But actually they're needed across the board, they need international quality lawyers and social sciences and all the other soft skills as well as the hard skilled people.
PODGER: The Ministry of Education and Training has said that it will try and help applicants in completing all of the formalities that will help them get home. In terms of working conditions, it's also looking to encourage educational institutions to improve their teaching programs to lift those up to international standards. Is that much of an issue in Vietnam?
MCCARTY: Oh absolutely, their tertiary education system is just way behind, it needs a complete overhaul, independence, it needs a proper private sector in it and curriculum reform. It's not just a matter of finance, it's a matter of autonomy and competition. They're way behind say Thailand in the quality of their universities and their technical colleges. So they really do need to do a lot there but a lot of it, the decisions are sort of political economy ones about allowing competition and renovating a whole university and getting rid of the old generation of teachers. It's not easy.
PODGER: Indeed, and given the high wages that are on offer outside of Vietnam in countries like Australia and the United States, is a project like this likely to work?
MCCARTY: Well I don't know the details of the project, but presumably it's voluntary that these people come back, so if they're not offered packages that are attractive you're not going to get anybody except a few charity cases. So they would appreciate those issues though, you're not going to launch a large program like that without seriously thinking that people are going to accept lower salaries that they're already getting in another country. I presume that's part of the strategy and it'll be expensive, but the Vietnamese are willing to pay money in this area nowadays, it's nearly become a middle income economy and they spend a lot of money giving the younger people scholarships to go and study overseas in England or America or Australia of their own money, not just donor money. And I'm sure they're willing to pay a lot of money to have the good overseas Vietnamese come back and work here.
PODGER: Should the government perhaps be casting the net a little bit wider and be looking not just at Vietnamese expats, but perhaps trying to attract people from other countries to move to Vietnam?
MCCARTY: Yes absolutely, I mean they haven't quite got in the habit of employing foreigners, foreigners they don't use in their government agencies or in their state corporations, all of the managers of the large corporations are Vietnamese. They're not used to pulling in talent and advertising the big jobs globally. Of course you can say that oversease Vietnamese have a big brownie point in their favour because they speak Vietnamese, but then great managers or great scientists can come from anywhere.
