More than 700,000 people will join the country's workforce every year until 2015, an annual increase of 1.5 percent, according to a report on the country's labour and social trends.

This makes Vietnam one of the fastest growing labour markets in Southeast Asia, just behind Indonesia and the Philippines , notes the report released recently by the Institute of Labour Science and Social Affairs.

The economy is thus under pressure to create jobs, a task that could be hard given the current trend of low number of firms registered per capita and the fact most of them are small and medium-sized enterprises with little capacity to create jobs.

During the period from 2000 to 2007, agricultural jobs as a proportion of the total dropped from 65 per cent to 52 percent, with many workers shifting to the industrial and service sectors.

Cheap labour will no longer provide the country a competitive edge when it shifts from a labour-intensive, export-driven economy to a high-tech, capital-intensive one to climb in the global value chain./.