Business environment reform needs further promotion: expert

An enterprise in Vĩnh Phúc Province. Việt Nam's business environment needs more reform to promote enterprise development and the economic recovery. — VNA/VNS Photo

Ministries, sectors and localities need to drastically improve the business environment, including improving the efficiency in implementing reform.

That was the message from Nguyễn Thị Minh Thảo, head of the Business Environment and Competitiveness Research Department at the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM).

In addition, improving the business environment should be associated with responsibility of the leaders of organisations, she said.

Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment Trần Duy Đông said this year had already seen a number of difficulties for businesses. In January alone, the number of businesses withdrawing from the market nearly doubled compared to those entering.

On January 5, the Government issued the Resolution 02 to promote further this reform,

said, to strengthen confidence of investors and enterprises and arouse entrepreneurial spirit to enhance the economic recovery and development.

Resolution 02 requires ministries, sectors and localities to focus on removing legal inadequacies in implementing investment projects. They need to improve the quality of reform for the list of conditional business investment industries and business conditions, and effectively deploy the national single-window information portal.

They also have to complete policies on promoting investment, production and business associated with innovation and digital transformation, sustainable development and the quality of business development services.

According to Thảo from CIEM, the resolution is an encouragement to the business community, creating a driving force to continue carrying out business investment activities. This resolution also creates pressure for the ministries, sectors and localities to make changes for the business community as well as the socio-economic development.

She believes to successfully implement the Resolution 02, the participation of the association and business community is necessary to identify challenges, thereby finding appropriate solutions to improve the business environment.

According to Đậu Anh Tuấn, deputy general secretary of Việt Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), in Resolution 02, the Government focuses on the capacity and competitiveness of domestic private enterprises, with the goal of increasing the number of newly established private enterprises and minimising the number of enterprises leaving from market. Besides removing market difficulties, the difficulties from mechanisms and policies should be reduced.

Among the solutions, the Government requires ministries, branches and localities to proactively and regularly review the existing regulations and procedures and then propose the removal of contents that are not beneficial to the production and business activities of enterprises.

The policy at this resolution is that Vietnamese goods, businesses and economy can only have more competitiveness if the legal system is simpler, more convenient and more competitive than other regional countries.

Another new point in this resolution is to require the businesses to hold proactively periodic dialogues with VCCI and business associations to point out inadequacies in legal regulations that need to be overcome.

To achieve high growth momentum for the whole year, cutting barriers to the business environment and institutional reform are important tasks.

Authorities need to carry out many other solutions to continuously increase the competitiveness of the business environment, such as improving quality of infrastructure and human resources, and promoting domestic industrial production.

In particular, they should focus on two main groups of solutions on reducing business costs along with reforming law enforcement.

The authorities at all levels need to step up to improve the quality of policy enforcement, because if the policy is good but not implemented well, the efficiency of that policy is not high, according to the VCCI official.

The Pháp Luật TP.HCM (HCMC Law Newspaper) quoted Deputy Minister Đông as saying that many localities had dialogues with the businesses so the latter can directly report and make recommendations to the local leaders.

The ministry always wants business associations, commodity associations and the business community to actively participate in having criticism, building policies and reporting on problems and difficulties, according to Đông.

They need to proactively propose recommendations relating to policies and policy enforcement to ensure effective state management, while creating convenience and safety for production and business activities of enterprises.

The ministry will coordinate closely with ministries, sectors, localities, the business community and relevant parties to promote institutional reform, create an open, favourable and safe business environment to create quick changes in the economic recovery and development.