Vietnam middle class boomsMore than 70 per cent of the Vietnamese population has fully escaped poverty, with at least 14 million having joint the global middle class, a World Bank report found on Thursday. Between 2014 and 2016, a staggering three million Vietnamese people joined the global middle class. This rate was positively higher than the Government’s annual goal of 1.5 per cent reduction as outlined in its National Target Programme on Poverty Reduction for 2016-20. Households of ethnic minorities – the most vulnerable to poverty – living in poor conditions witnessed a record decline over the last decade. Close to two million ethnic minority people climbed the economic ladder, equivalent to the number of poor people declining from 8.4 million in 2010 down to 6.6 million in 2016.