September 13, 2014
– Despite some progress in tax and customs reforms, Vietnam’s competitiveness has advanced slightly in the rankings of the Global Competitiveness Report 2014 – 2015.
The report announced by the World Economic Forum last Wednesday shows that Vietnam moved to the 68th position among 144 economies, two places higher from last year when it ranked 70th among 148 nations.
In Southeast Asia, Vietnam came after Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Vietnam saw improvements in some criteria such as female labor ratio (23rd), primary education (29th), the ratio of malaria cases/100,000 persons (25th).
Meanwhile, the nation performed poorly for important criteria that cause big impacts on the business environment such as official costs for exports and imports (121st), infrastructure base quality (112th) and government budget balance (118th).
There were some improvements in the macro economy (75th), public institutions (85th), property right protection (104th), market efficiency (91th), corruption fight (109th), infrastructure-energy (81st), market scale (34th), labor market (49th) and technological readiness (99th).
However, Vietnam’s financial and banking sector remain vulnerable. According to the report, Vietnam almost made no improvements despite much effort in innovation in this sector, which is ranked 90th.
According to economists, the WB’s ranking reflects the true picture of reforms in Vietnam, which are still progressing slowly. Reforms in the tax and customs sectors have been carried out but are still inadequate, while reforms in other sectors such as power supply and business establishment are yet to be seen. They advised that the country should make stronger efforts to speed up the reforms process, especially in administrative procedures related to the business environment.
Recently, the Government has set up a target of improving Vietnam’s business environment to the average level of countries in the ASEAN 6 block (Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Brunei). However, Nguyen Dinh Cung, director of the Central Institute for Economic Management, said only the tax, customs, construction and investment sectors have pledged to realize the target, while most other sectors have yet to make any commitment. The tax sector is expected to slash the time for completing tax procedures and payment from the current level of 537 hours to 171 hours per year from next year. The customs sector has pledged to cut 30% of the time required for completing customs procedures for export and import goods next year.
(The Saigon Times)