The Straits Times reported that Vietnamese in exile overseas send back US$3 (AU$5) last year to their kin back home. Sourcing their information from Hanoi’s Labour newspaper.

It said the that Mrs Nguyen Ngoc Lan, the deputy director of the State’s foreign-exchange department told the Labour newspaper that more than US$1 billion had been received via the normal banking channels while the rest arriving through other means.

Vietnamese people do not trust state own banks in Vietnam and foreign banks charge higher service fees compared to money agents which is commonly used by the 3 million strong Vietnamese residing overseas to transfer billions of dollars. The amount of money that gets transfer by agents are often below $AU 10,000 while larger amounts are sent by official banking channels.   

Sending money via money agents makes monetary movements difficult and elusive to monitor since no official transaction is recorded. Dodging tax, unreliable and incompetent government officials are other reasons why Vietnamese chose to use money agents instead of banks.

The sender will often rely solely on trust and reputation of the agents to deliver the money according to the exchange rate at the time.

Given these practices, it can be fairly assume that it is likely that more than $5 billion is sent to Vietnam every year. With the largest amount around the lunar New Year.

It also noted that the Vietnamese government would be introducing incentives to encourage overseas Vietnamese known as Viet Kieu, to send more money home.

The incentive came into effect on November last year.  Another part of the incentive was to abolish the dual -prizing system inflicted on Viet Kieu.

Under normal circumstances, overseas people are forced to pay twice as much for goods and services purchased.

At the same time the Vietnamese Overseas Committee has liased with the ministry 
of finance and planning and investment to work on a proposal to woo about 300,000 professionals and other highly qualified Viet Kieu to help speed up he process of industrialisation of Vietnam, the Business Beat said.

J.Lam