To achieve 7% GDP, first of all, you must know where 7% is created.
3 years ago, according to statistics from Touring Data, the "Born Pink" concert of the famous Korean group - BlackPink held in Hanoi attracted 67,443 spectators with a "sold out" rate of 100% and had a revenue of 13,660,064 USD (more than 333.4 billion VND).
Hanoi Department of Tourism announced that also during the 2 days of the BlackPink concert, the total number of tourists to Hanoi reached about 170,000, total estimated revenue reached 630 billion VND. Compared to the average level, both the number of visitors and revenue of these 2 days increased by more than 25%.
The question is, how much does such a concert actually contribute to the capital's economy? Among the 170,000 visitors, how many people come to Hanoi just because of BlackPink? Detailed statistics are not available.
A concert with 50,000 attendees is a figure. But if developing according to industrial cultural thinking, it is necessary to know more about ticket sales revenue; how much labor is mobilized; what proportion domestic production costs account for; how much revenue from hotels, transportation, and catering increases; who owns the copyright; how much part of the value chain can Vietnamese businesses retain?
Similarly, a movie with a large box office revenue does not reflect the entire economic value if it does not measure copyright revenue, distribution on digital platforms, advertising, derivative products, jobs created or exportability.
A video game with millions of downloads is not enough to affirm its contribution if you do not know the revenue, taxes, intellectual property value, number of employees and value share held by Vietnamese businesses.
Statistics are therefore not simply "counting" but must help see the value chain. This is an increasingly urgent issue when the cultural industry is placed in the position of a new growth engine.
Resolution No. 80-NQ/TW sets a target for cultural industries to contribute 7% of GDP by 2030 and 9% by 2045, while the current proportion is only about 4% of GDP. However, one of the major gaps pointed out is that Vietnam still lacks a synchronous ecosystem in terms of institutions, markets, data, human resources and mechanisms to mobilize resources to transform cultural creativity into new production capacity.
The gap from 4% to 7% of GDP is not simply adding a few successful movies, a few "ticket-sold" music festivals or a few creative products that create a buzz.
That must be the growth of an entire ecosystem. And to manage that process, the first question must be answered with data: 4% of GDP is currently formed from which industries? How much does cinema contribute? How much does advertising, design, performing arts, publishing, video games, digital content contribute? What is the added value of each field? How many workers are living on creative industries? What are their incomes? Without reliable source data, the 7% target is very likely to be seen as a general figure at the destination, while the road to that destination has not been quantified.
Hanoi embarks on data creation
At the Workshop "Statistics of cultural industries in Hanoi", held in early June 2026, Ms. Le Thi Anh Mai - Deputy Director of Hanoi Department of Culture and Sports said: The cultural industry is a field with a wide scope, high inter-sectoral nature and many products with intangible values. We can see the revenue of a film business, but it is difficult to fully measure the spreading value of a cultural festival; the number of handicraft production facilities can be statistically analyzed, but it is not easy to quantify the impact of heritage, cultural identity or creative attraction on urban development.
Agreeing with the above viewpoint, Ms. Nguyen Thi Thu Ha - Director of the Center for Support and Development of Contemporary Art affirmed: "Building a system of data and statistics on cultural industries is of particular importance to the policy making process as well as sustainable development.
Currently, Vietnam does not have a specialized statistical framework for this field. Data is still fragmented, unsynchronized and difficult to compare because it is collected according to each task and individual project. In addition, the coordination between management agencies, ministries, branches, localities and market research organizations is not really effective, leading to information fragmentation.
To overcome the current limitations, Ms. Ha proposed to soon build a national statistical framework for the cultural industry; strengthen coordination mechanisms between relevant agencies; build a focal point for managing, exploiting and publishing data on digital platforms; and at the same time improve the capacity of the team working in cultural statistics.
Notably, at the end of July 2026, Hanoi issued Decision No. 4034/QD-UBND approving the Project "Ministry of Statistical Indicators on Cultural Industries in Hanoi City".
It can be said that Hanoi has pioneered in building and implementing a set of local-level industrial and cultural statistical indicators, which will contribute to perfecting the methodology and providing practical experience for the process of building a national industrial and cultural statistical system, while affirming the leading role of the Capital in creative economic development.
One of the key contents of the Project is to fully identify 11 cultural industries of Hanoi including: Cinema; fine arts, photography and exhibition; performing arts; software and entertainment games; advertising; handicrafts; cultural tourism; creative design; television and radio; publishing; cuisine.
At the national level, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is also drafting a Decision of the Prime Minister promulgating a set of statistical indicators on the contribution of the cultural industry to economic development.
According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the promulgation of a set of statistical indicators on the contribution of cultural industries to economic development aims to help clearly identify the development scale of each cultural industry; infrastructure capacity, technical facilities and market participants; products, services and market development level; revenue, added value, jobs and income of workers; the level of application of modern technology, digital technology and digital transformation in cultural industries; as a basis for state management of cultural industry; planning industry development policies; monitoring and evaluating the results of cultural industry development implementation; building a unified database on economic contribution of the cultural industry sector.
Vietnam is setting very high goals for the cultural industry. But to know if the goal is achieved or not, we cannot wait until 2030 to recalculate. Each year, we must know which industries are growing, which are slow; which localities are breaking through, which localities have not created markets; how much new revenue has been generated, how many new jobs have been formed, how much intellectual property has been commercialized?
According to experts, to turn culture into an economic sector, first of all, culture must be measured by the tools of an economic sector, but still not lose the specific spiritual values of culture.
When there are full data, Vietnam will not only know how much percentage of GDP the cultural industry is contributing to, but will also know where to invest, which bottlenecks to remove and which sectors can become new growth drivers.
And that could be an important starting point for the target of 7% GDP by 2030 to not just be an expected number, but to become a measurable, countable and organized target.
