Support policies must be practical for enterprises

Mezic Steel Company in Ba Ria - Vung Tau province. (Photo: VNA)

Experts have said that the support policies must be practical to ensure accessibility for enterprises.

Several support measures introduced recently have proven not as effective as expected.

Recently, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) proposed the undisbursed part of the 2% interest rate support package, worth up to 40 trillion VND (1.7 billion USD), to be transferred into other forms of support.

Statistics showed that only around 256 billion VND of the package was disbursed to 1,784 customers as of the end of February. It was forecast that about 2.57 trillion VND would be disbursed by the end of this year when the package expired. This would mean that only 6% of the package was disbursed, leaving a huge sum of more than 37.4 trillion VND unspent.

Ha Thu Giang, Director of the SBV’s Credit Department, said that enterprises needed support such as capital sources or tax reduction rather than interest rate support.

The central bank sent the evaluation of the support package to the Ministry of Planning and Investment for consideration of using the undisbursed sum for other forms of support which are more feasible.

Previously, a survey of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) in 2022 found that 29.5% of enterprises heard about the support package but only 2% received loans from the 2% interest rate support package. More than 56% of enterprises said they faced difficulties when accessing the loans.

Nguyen Xuan Thong, Deputy General Secretary of the Hanoi Association of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, said that the conditions of the loans from the support package presented a significant difficulty to enterprises.

Regarding the proposal of the central bank to transfer the undisbursed sum of the 2% interest rate support package into other forms of support, many experts said this should be the way to go and must be implemented as early as possible.

Pham Xuan Hoe, former Director of the Banking Strategy Institute, said it was difficult for enterprises to meet the requirements for the loans, especially in the context that property assets were going down.

The support package should be transformed into funds to provide trust-based guarantees for small and medium-sized enterprises, he said.

Cao Viet Sinh, former Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment, said that the resource from the 2% interest rate support should be used to provide other forms of support such as tax and fee reductions or to accelerate public investment.

Nguyen Quoc Viet, Deputy Director of the Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy Research, said if the package could not be changed immediately, it was pressing to remove obstacles which required banks and customers to sit down together to find out problems and solutions, so that the credit flow could be improved.

Another opinion was that the support package should be provided for the development of social housing projects or housing projects for workers, a focus of credit policy to ensure social security.

Statistics showed that Vietnam would need around 849.5 trillion VND to develop more than 1 million apartments for low-income earners by 2030./.