In Vietnam, the volume of fuel consumed by vehicles and smuggled via borders is extremely huge. Thus, the government is making every effort to govern the use of vehicles and the cross-border fuel trade. Personally, I totally agree with the government to increase the petroleum price for following reasons.
First of all, the higher of petroleum lessens the people’s desire for using private vehicles. According to statistics of GSO Vietnam, there are approximate 25.000.000 motorcycles and 5.000.000 personal cars are used daily in Vietnam. Such a huge number of traveling tools are causing serious traffic jams in nationwide cities, exhausting dangerous emissions against the environment, and raising the amount of traffic accidents. Meanwhile, the number of people using public vehicles like buses and trains is small, just around 4 million man-turns in all cities and provinces according to GSO Vietnam, too. Hence, it is right for the government to increase the price of petroleum and promote the civilian to travel by public vehicles in order to reduce the use of personal vehicle, minimize the traffic congestion, protect the environment, limit the accident, and encourages the people to use public transport means.
Secondly, the increase in the petroleum price helps to limit the fuel smuggling via borders. For ages, the fuel price in Vietnam is much lower than in neighbor countries such as Lao, Campuchia and Thailand. This phenomenon has promoted a lot of people to smuggle petroleum products from Vietnam to those countries and this act has caused great loss for the national budget because the country has to use a large amount of foreign currency to import petroleum products. Furthermore, the border fuel smuggling has brought the disorder for the domestic petroleum market in recent years. It is easy to imagine that once the fuel price in Vietnam is on the same level with neighbor countries, the cross-border smuggling will disappear as smugglers would not be able to make benefits from their illegal action.
It can be concluded that the government should increase the price of fuel in order to reduce the use of private vehicles and deal with the cross-border petrol smuggling.