The loans are to meet administrative and training costs, in addition to travel expenses.

The project, approved by  the Prime Minister last week, is co-sponsored by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs and the Communist Youth Union, and is set to run from now until 2015.

It is estimated that Vietnamese employees must spend around US$4,000 in training and counseling fees, as well as travel expenses, to work in Taiwan. It costs even more to be an expatriate worker in Japan or the Republic of Korea.

Under the plan, the workers, particularly from rural areas, will also be able to apply for loans of US$50 a month for vocational training. Ethnic minority workers are entitled to free vocational training and job-start loans.

About 200,000 young people are estimated to need loans annually to meet the costs of working abroad.

Research has shown that few workers are trained well enough or in the right fields to meet the demands of foreign firms.

53 million Vietnamese are of working age but only 27.5 percent of them are trained and more than 25 million work in agriculture but 70 percent of them are untrained and have no industrial experience.

Last year, the Prime Minister called on the Youth Union to work with the Ministry of Education and Training to set up a US$1 billion vocation training programme to raise the standards of potential employees.