Vietnam slips in global business environment resilience ranking

By Nguyen Quy June 6, 2021 | 05:44 am PT

A man working on a robot at the Vietnam - Japan Center for Training and Technology Transfer in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo by VnExpress/Vien Thong.

Vietnam has dropped five places from last year to 96th place in the 2021 business environment resilience index, ranking below several Southeast Asian peers.

Vietnam lagged behind Singapore (12), Malaysia (44), Thailand (70), Indonesia (82) and the Philippines (89) in Southeast Asia, according to the 2021 FM Global Resilience Index, an annual ranking published by FM Global, an international commercial property insurer headquartered in the U.S.

In the Southeast Asian region, neighbors Laos (108) and Cambodia (117) were ranked lower than Vietnam.

The report measured the resilience of each economy's business environment based on economic factor, risk quality which measures the relative commercial and industrial property risk across countries, and supply chain.

Of the three factors, Vietnam, with an overall score of 37.9 out of 100 points, performed best in the supply chain category and did worst in risk quality.

Denmark topped the ranking, followed by Norway and Luxembourg.

Other countries in the bottom 10 of the list include Nepal, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Mali and Lebanon which havesuffered political and economic instability in recent years.

Eric Jones, vice president and global manager of business risk consulting at FM Global, said certain regions of the world are more susceptible to particular kinds of natural disasters and raw material shortages, and executives should be mindful of those particular risks when evaluating where they conduct business.

Despite the deleterious impacts of Covid-19, the Vietnamese economy grew at 2.91 percent last year, when many other economies experienced negative growth. The government has set a GDP growth target of 6.5 percent for this year.