A conference was held in Hanoi on November 4 by the State Committee for Overseas Vietnamese Affairs (COVA) to review the six-year implementation of the Political Bureau’s Resolution No 36 on overseas Vietnamese affairs.

Attending the conference was Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem, former Vice President Truong My Hoa, along with 400 delegates from various ministries, sectors, provinces and cities around the country.

According to COVA, six years after implementing Resolution No 36, progress has been made in Party and State’s guidelines and policies for overseas Vietnamese affairs, boosting the confidence of the overseas Vietnamese community in Vietnam’s Doi Moi (Renewal) process and national development.

The conference pointed out certain weaknesses, however, in overseas Vietnamese-related work. For example, the Resolution has not yet been introduced regularly and widely to overseas Vietnamese and foreign relations information is not relayed clearly enough to the Vietnamese community abroad.

Deputy PM Khiem underscored the need to more effectively implement the Resolution by sending working groups to areas inhabited by overseas Vietnamese to give them a better grasp of the resolution and a better understanding of Party and State policies.

To speed up the implementation of policies and laws related to overseas Vietnamese, the capacity of the staff involved in overseas Vietnamese affairs must be improved, Mr Khiem stressed.

Nearly 4 million overseas Vietnamese are living in 103 countries and territories around the world, of which 400,000 have higher education qualifications.

Approximately 500,000 overseas Vietnamese return home every year, 300 of them return to work and thousands of others come to seek investment opportunities in the home country.

There have been more than 3,200 overseas Vietnamese-invested projects in Vietnam, with a total investment capital of US$5.7 billion.

Remittance of overseas earnings averages 10-15 percent per year. The figure was US$ 6.7 billion in 2007, US$ 7.4 billion in 2008, and US$6.8 billion in 2009.