Administrative pressure on improving the business environment needs to be continued

	Looking back on the effort of reforming administrative procedures of Finance sector in 2018
	101 procedures newly connected to National Single Window 2018
	98 procedures newly connected to National Single Window

Sir, after 5 years of improving the business environment, reforms are still considered to be incomplete. Could you give some comment on this issue?

The nature, the indicators of industries are different. The nature means the difference between the reports of relevant state agencies and the actual impact on businesses and here there is a relatively large gap.

In fact, there are places where the improvement of the business environment is improperly modified, which means just shortening words rather than substantially changing the business conditions, or just removing business conditions which are not really important to businesses, such as abolishing a business certificate in a certain record. I think, what is not needed should be abolished.

Thus, there is still a gap between abolishing business conditions and business impacts. This gap not only is the change in writing but it is also the actual implementation, while the actual implementation depends on many factors. But the first factor must be a publication that must be specific and reasonable. When writing a document, there is only one purpose: to facilitate as much as possible, then it is really good for business, but drafting the document and still retaining your rights, the impact on businesses will certainly not reach the goal.

So, how should these limitations be overcome in the process of continuing to improve the business environment and competitiveness under the spirit of Resolution 02/2019/NQ-CP, Sir?

Regarding remedies, I think that, first of all, the administrative pressure by the Prime Minister must be continued. Secondly, the implementation is carried out by local authorities at district levels, so the role and position of the local People's Committee president is very important. Because an official may require people, businesses to write in capitals or lowercase, dots or commas... such corrections are deliberately creating barriers that make it difficult for businesses and finally self-interest.

Therefore, the supervision of the local head for this implementation is very important, and this supervisor must get information from the businesses and the media. If an official is reported to have deliberately harassed a business, he or she should be automatically replaced and the work transferred to others. In fact, when we went to investigate, there were countless cases of harassment. Newspapers need to take more action, more closely follow businesses to reflect on these cases.

Two indicators of bankruptcy and settlement of contract disputes show almost no improvement. In your opinion, in 2019 as well as the following years, what should be done to improve these two indicators in order to solve difficulties and release greater potential for enterprises?

As I said, these are two very important indicators of the business environment. However, our two indicators are very low, in the last 5 years, there has been basically no reform.

Regarding the contract settlement index, there is always a contract dispute in business, and if contract disputes are resolved effectively, people and businesses will believe that when there is a dispute, there will be an agency that will resolve the dispute fairly, effectively and quickly. With this mechanism in place, businesses will accept more risks to expand their business, establish business relationships with new partners or partners with risks. This promotes a more dynamic economy.

The greater the risk, the higher the profitability of a business, the scale and operation of the business will be expanded. Along with that, if resolving the contract dispute quickly, it will handle the disputed property to switch to a new deal. Or with corporate bankruptcy, businesses that are inactive or ineffective, those businesses' opportunities or assets should be converted by better managers, for moving inactive, unproductive assets to operational assets, which will release potential.

These are the two indicators of the Court's responsibility, but the Court sector is not a specialized law-making branch, but rather a law-using branch, because law-making is a demand of the Government to manage society. Although the Government, MPI (Ministry of Planning and Investment) has sent a letter requesting the Court to cooperate with the Government and relevant agencies to improve these two indicators, but by January 2019 we have not yet received a response.

In 2019, the Government assigned the Ministry of Justice to take responsibility for coordinating with the Court sector and related agencies to improve and reform these two indicators. Hopefully, with the active initiative of the Ministry of Justice, the Court sector will have more active coordination to improve the business environment. I would like to emphasize that these are two extremely important indicators for the market economy, and if not improving, I believe we cannot enter the top ASEAN-4 as per the target.

Could you point out some new and different points in the Resolution 02 which are expected to bring a fresh breeze in improving the business environment in 2019?

The Resolution 02 on improving the business environment, improving competitiveness in 2019 has some differences. This resolution does not set out specific tasks and solutions assigned to each ministry and branch, instead, the Resolution identifies each index, specific targets and objectives of each indicator, index. The ultimate goal is to enter the top ASEAN-4. The Resolution assigns each Minister to take responsibility for implementing each of those objectives, and the way and time to do it is decided by the Minister.

Accordingly, the responsibilities of the Ministers are increasingly enhanced, the Minister or the head of the sector is responsible for each indicator, responsible to the Government for achieving the assigned targets. Then, if the goal is not achieved, the Minister will be fully responsible.

In addition, the Government determined to focus on 4 key areas of improving the business environment in 2019, including two previous tasks. The first field is to continue to cut and simplify business conditions, because in fact, businesses are complaining a lot about obstacles and barriers in implementing business conditions.

The recent reforms were very fierce, but the enterprises reflected that those reforms were in some ways not yet true, and did not affect enterprises properly, benefiting businesses like the administrative reports of State agencies. The second area is the reform in specialized inspection, because we have not reached our goal in 2018. This is still an area where the compliance costs of time and money to implement import and export procedures, especially the specialized inspection procedures of Vietnam are still the highest among ASEAN countries, twice as much compared to Thailand, 3 times more than Malaysia and many times more than Singapore.

Improving business environment is Government’s priority in 2019 Improving the business environment and national competitiveness is a core policy priority of the Vietnamese Government in ...

The third area focused on for improvement in 2019 is electronic payment with online service level 4, with the goal of current payment to minimize the contact between people, businesses and civil servants, because in fact, direct contact is an opportunity for corruption, is the place where civil servants deliberately harass businesses. However, doing this is not easy. And the fourth field is to develop an ecosystem of innovation and support to encourage creative startups. There is an opinion that Vietnam has already got a system of innovation, but we see this is not true.

Thank you, Sir!