Under the current PIT law, pho sellers and taxi motorbike taxi drivers have to pay tax.

The HCMC People’s Committee believes that mobile phones must bear a luxury tax or special consumption tax (SCT) as it is called in Vietnam.

Vietnam’s cosmetics market is worth $2.3 billion, but domestic companies pocket only 10 percent of the value.

Vietnamese companies leading the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market could be acquisition targets for foreign firms in the near future.

Expected to account for 33 percent of Vietnam’s population by 2020, the middle class is  a major contributor to the country’s development, according to Phung Duc Tung, head of the Mekong Development Institute.

The modern retail model is one of the best ways to approach the Vietnamese consumer goods market, with its young population, rising income, and shifting consumption habits, from traditional stores to shopping malls.

VietNamNet Bridge - Rural areas, where 70 percent of the population lives and where the average income per capita has been increasing rapidly, is a market with great potential.

VietNamNet Bridge - The Vietnamese brewery market is dominated by three major players. However, the face of the market may be change in the near future as a new company has arrived.

VietNamNet Bridge - Vietnamese, the citizens of a low-average income country as listed by the World Bank, are known in the world as spendthrifts, a National Assembly deputy has said.

Housing prices in Vietnam are higher than the income of the majority of Vietnamese, but the houses in Vietnam are cheaper than many other countries, according to Nguyen Xuan Quang, president of Nam Long Investment JSC. 

The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) has voiced its support for Electricity of Vietnam’s (EVN) plan to raise retail electricity prices, saying that it would go bankrupt if not allowed to do so.

The electricity price in the country is scheduled to increase by 9.5 percent after Tet (February 2015) to VND1,652.19 per kwh, leaving questions about whether the price is appropriate.  

The Vietnamese public, who are known as the biggest beer drinkers in the world, as optimists about their future, and as big spenders on luxury goods despite modest incomes, curbed their expenses in 2014 more than in the past.

Like colleagues in many other countries in the world, Vietnamese pilots are very well paid. According to the national flag air carrier Vietnam Airlines, a captain of the airline can receive VND200 million a month.

The battle in the beer market is especially harsh in the high-end segment as Vietnamese breweries are now trying to target high-income earners.

VietNamNet Bridge – Banking officers and air stewardesses are believed to have some of the highest incomes in Vietnam.

It’s still too early to say Aneuser-Busch Inbev (AB Inbev) would be a big threat to the existing brewery manufacturers in Vietnam. Three big guys in the field once had to leave the Vietnamese market.

Faced with poverty and hunger after liberation in 1975, a Gie Trieng man levelled hills and mountains with his own bare hands to create a wet rice field legacy for his family and fellow villagers.

The global debt clock at 3 pm of April 15, Hanoi time, showed that Vietnam’s public debt was equal to 49.2 percent of the country’s GDP.