Students of the Ha Huy Tap Secondary School in Vinh city, the central province of Nghe An attend the new school year ceremony 2020-2021 (Photo: VNA) Hanoi (VNA) - A newreport by the World Bank Group pointed out that between 2010 and 2020,the Human Capital Index for Vietnam increasedfrom 0.66 to 0.69.
This means a child born in Vietnam today will be 69 percent as productivewhen they grow up as they could have been if they enjoyed complete educationand full health.
The score is well above the world's average of 0.56. It is higher than theaverage for East Asia and Pacific region, as well as for lower-middle-incomecountries.
An above average score has enabled Vietnam to reach 38th position among174 economies in the 2020 Human Capital Index.
Theindex’s components include the probability of survival to age five, expectedyears of school, harmonised test scores, learning-adjusted years of school,adult survival rate and healthy growth (not stunted rate).
A breakdown of the index shows98 out of 100 children born in Vietnamsurvive to age five; a Vietnamese boy or girl attending school at the age of 4 cancomplete 12.9 years of school, or high school, by the age of 18; and 76 percentof children are not stunted.
Vietnamesestudents received 519 points in Harmonized Test Scores (HTS), a level similarto countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. HTS measures howmuch children learn in school based on countries' relative performance oninternational student achievement tests, where 625 represents advancedattainment and 300 represents minimum attainment.
Furthermore, 87 percent of15-year-olds will likely live until the age of 60 in Vietnam.
Accordingto the report, Vietnam’sHuman Capital Index continues to be higher than the average for countries ofthe same income level despite the level of public spending on health, educationand social assistance being lower than that of its peers.
In Southeast Asia, Vietnam ranked above Brunei (56th),Malaysia (62nd), Thailand (63rd), Indonesia (96th), the Philippines (103rd),Cambodia (118th), Myanmar (120th), Laos (126th) and Timor-Leste (128th).
The World BankGroup’s 2020 Human Capital Index (HCI) includes health and educationdata for 174 countries – covering 98 percent of the world’s population – up toMarch 2020, providing a pre-pandemic baseline on the health and education ofchildren.
The HCI, first launched in2018, measures the amount of human capital a child born today can expect toattain by age 18.
It conveys the productivity ofthe next generation of workers compared to a benchmark of complete educationand full health./.
