With its position as the central urban area of the Southeast region, Dong Nai City is oriented toward innovating its growth model and improving development quality to create a new driving force for the economy in the coming period.

Dong Nai City will develop the Long Thanh Airport urban area. Photo: Van Dung

According to the development orientation, Dong Nai City will play a strategic connecting role between Ho Chi Minh City and other provinces within the Southern Key Economic Zone; concurrently, it will serve as the hub linking the maritime economy, logistics, and inter-regional supply chains. The set objective is fast and sustainable growth, heading toward becoming an important growth pole for the Southern region and the entire country.

However, within the new context, the growth model relying primarily on assembly, labor-intensive activities, and extensive investment attraction has exposed numerous limitations. Issues concerning planning, human resource quality, investment attraction, and urban infrastructure are posing new requirements for the locality.

According to the socio-economic development plan for the 2026-2030 period, Dong Nai identifies growth model innovation as one of its core tasks. This is regarded as the key solution to enhance the productivity, competitiveness, and growth quality of the economy.

For many years, Dong Nai has been considered the "industrial capital" of the country, possessing a strong attraction for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows. Currently, the locality hosts around 2,300 FDI projects with a total registered capital of nearly 45 billion USD. However, the majority of these projects remain concentrated in processing and assembly fields using a large workforce, while the localization rate and linkages between FDI enterprises and domestic enterprises remain low.

Dong Nai heads toward a modern seaport hub

Along with that, the pressures regarding social infrastructure, housing for workers, education, healthcare, and urban infrastructure are increasing in tandem with the pace of industrial development. The quality of human resources, especially in the fields of high technology, logistics, and innovation, is assessed as not yet meeting the development requirements of the new era.

According to the leadership of Dong Nai City, the locality stands before many great opportunities to create a breakthrough thanks to advantages in geographical location, land bank, population, and a transportation infrastructure system that is receiving heavy investment. The deployment of key projects such as Long Thanh International Airport, inter-regional expressways, and logistics systems is expected to unlock new development space for the city.

General Secretary and President To Lam requested Dong Nai City to architect a new growth model. Photo: Cong Nghia

During a working session between a Central working delegation and the Standing Committee of the Dong Nai City Party Committee on May 18, General Secretary and President To Lam requested Dong Nai City to architect a new growth model, elevating the city beyond the boundaries of a traditional industrial center. The new position demands that Dong Nai develop through productivity, technology, knowledge content, innovation capacity, and spillover vitality toward domestic enterprises, rather than relying heavily on industrial land, project volume, and cheap labor.

Investment attraction must adopt higher selection standards, prioritizing projects that bring along technology, governance, supply chains, training capacity, and the ability to link with domestic enterprises. Simultaneously, the city must review and adjust projects that consume vast amounts of land, utilize low technology, contribute limited value, and exert heavy pressure on infrastructure, the environment, and social welfare.

In particular, General Secretary and President To Lam clearly specified that Dong Nai City must take Long Thanh Airport as the nucleus to restructure its development space. From Long Thanh, an ecosystem comprising an airport urban area, aviation services, trade, finance, conferences, exhibitions, training, healthcare, tourism, and high-quality services must be formed. The city needs to promptly formulate a comprehensive master project to develop the Long Thanh Airport urban area, Nhon Trach, and the adjacent regions.

Source: https://daibieunhandan.vn/