
Hanoi (VNA) –Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh received President ofIle-de-France region Valérie Pécresse in Hanoi on July 16.
The Ile-de-France delegation has been on a visitto the capital city of Hanoi to attend the celebration of 30 years ofcooperative ties between the two localities.
At the meeting, Minh noted with satisfactionthat the Vietnam-France strategic partnership is growing well in all spheres.Notably, the two countries have regularly exchanged high-ranking delegations,including a visit to France by Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong inMarch 2018 and a trip to Vietnam by French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe inNovember the same year.
The Deputy PM highly valued the development ofeconomic ties between the two countries with bilateral trade topping 5 billionEUR each year.
He added locality-to-locality cooperation andpeople-to-people exchange have helped intensify the strategic partnership,matching the interests and demand of both nations. Particularly, Ile-de-Francewas the first French locality to set up a partnership with Hanoi, laying thefoundation for developing cooperation between the two countries’ localities,Minh said.
The official also applauded Hanoi andIle-de-France’s signing of a memorandum of understanding on the establishmentof a startup incubator named Hanoi French City Lab to support Vietnamese andFrench startups in urban development, environment, smart city building andsustainable development, which are also the fields of France’s strength andHanoi’s demand.
Minh asked Pécresse to help accelerate the EuropeanUnion (EU) and French parliaments' ratification of the free trade agreement andthe investment protection agreement that Vietnam and the EU signed in late Juneso as to soon bring about practical benefits to both sides.
For her part, Pécresse said the cooperationbetween Hanoi and Ile-de-France is a model for Vietnamese and French localitiesto follow.
During their stay in Hanoi, the Frenchdelegation took part in the opening ceremony of an air quality monitoringstation at the French Embassy, a workshop on cities and innovation, and thesigning ceremony of cooperation documents between the two localities.-VNA