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As part of the Vietnam 4.0 strategy of a technology-driven economy in the Vietnam Government’s aim is to build a “Digital Economy and Society” to enable Vietnam to become a digital leader and compete within the ASEAN economic community. The Vietnam Government’s Digital Economy and Society target includes placing Vietnam in the top 50 countries in the global ICT Development Index (IDI) Index, striving for Vietnam to be in the group of 70 leading e-Government countries (EGDI), with about 20% of GDP, the power of labor an average increase of over 7% / year. Total social invest for research and development (R&D) is at least 1.5% of GDP. At the same time striving for the year 2030, the digital economy will account for about 30% of the national GDP; labor productivity increases by 7.5% / year on average and total investment in R&D reaches at least 2% of GDP; 5G network coverage nationwide. Currently, Vietnam lags behind some of its nearest regional peers like Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore terms of these indices and other measures such as overall mobile penetration, smartphone ownership, 4G rollout, and digital skills (VN NIC.)
Innovation technology is capable of change the world because of both its utility and its pervasiveness. Indeed, digital technology has been classified as a General Purpose Technology (GPT) due to its implications not just for the economy, but for all aspects of life (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014). Digital technology is currently used in just about every sector in developed countries and increasingly in developing countries, the cost of personal computers has dropped from thousands of dollars a few years ago to a couple of hundred dollars, and even the smallest devices today have more processing power and memory than the most powerful supercomputers of the mid- twentieth century. Furthermore, digital technology has enabled the introduction of new products and services such as 3-D printing, Blockchain, artificial intelligence, Big Data analyst, cloud computing and the Internet of Things. This research reviews the literature assessing the economic impact of digital technologies – namely information communication technology (ICT) – on economies and people at Vietnam. In terms of the economic effects of digital technology on economies, this literature review summarises its relationship with economic growth and productivity. Although increases in ICT infrastructure/equipment investment and increased ICT adoption tend to be strongly correlated with economic growth and productivity, causality is yet to be resolved, and the potential for endogenous, simultaneous and reverse causality remains.