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Experts have labelled Viet Nam’s policies for investment incentives among the most complicated in Asia and called for simplifying them.
Speaking at Investment incentives in Viet Nam, a workshop held in Ha Noi on Tuesday, delegates from the Mekong Project Development Facility (MPDF) and Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS) said though the Vietnamese Government had instituted many investment incentives, the regime remained convoluted.
The policies to encourage investors should be explicit, simple and easily understandable for both investors and managers if Viet Nam were to become a competitive economy, they said.
They attributed the complexity of the investment policies and incentives to the constant changes made to them in the past few years.
Ross Chapman, an MPDF expert, said though many businesses had met the criteria to get the incentives, they failed to because of this complexity and the need to grease palms to obtain certificates needed to get them.
Patricia Dodson, second secretary at the Australian Embassy in Ha Noi, said besides being explicit and clear, incentives should have specific objectives.
The workshop, co-hosted by the Ministry of Planning and Investment, MPDF, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and FIAS, is expected to serve as a forum to generate opinions for the Law on Investment, the drafting of which will start in 2005.
Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment, Lai Quang Thuc, said foreign investment had emerged as an important aspect of the country’s economy. Foreign-invested projects now account for a full third of the non-petroleum export revenue, 35 per cent of industrial output and 14.5 per cent of GDP. Viet Nam has licensed nearly 4,800 foreign-invested projects with a combined capital of US$43.9 billion.
VNS - (29/11/2004)
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