According to Ms. Nguyen Minh Thao, Head of the Business Environment and Competitiveness Department of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), improving the quality of the business environment still has a lot of room for improvement. There are still unnecessary, unreasonable, and unclear business conditions that may lead to the discretion of state management agencies.

Ms. Nguyen Minh Thao, Head of the Business Environment and
Competitiveness Department of the Central Institute
for Economic Management (CIEM)

In your opinion, what are the procedures and conditions most "feared" by businesses in recent years?

The specialized management and inspection reform has achieved certain results. Specifically, items subject to specialized management and inspection have decreased by 12,600 items from about 82,698 items (in 2015) to 70,087 items (at present), the proportion of import-export shipments requiring specialized inspectionat the clearance stage is about 19.4% of the sector.

In many areas, specialized inspection regulations are gradually applying the principle of risk management. Most of the quality management procedures have been moved to the post-clearance stage, the composition of the documents and the time required for specialized inspection have been significantly shortened. Up to now, 13 ministries and branches have participated in connecting the National Single Window with 207 out of 250 procedures.

However, administrative and specialized inspection procedures are still a big concern for businesses when the positive changes in management and specialized inspection are still too few compared to the Government's requirements and expectations of the business. In fact, the number of documents is too high, making it difficult and confusing for both enterprises and customs offices in monitoring, updating and applying procedures.

There are still unnecessary, unreasonable and unclear business conditions that may lead to the discretion of state management agencies. Many business conditions are under the form of regulations on certificates issued by state authorities, are common in all fields. The regulation of certification is sometimes more formal than substantive competence.

In addition, the quality of the document is not high, frequently changed and adjusted, which also makes it difficult for businesses to update and prepare to meet the requirements.

Some regulations have removed difficulties and obstacles for businesses, but there are documents that cause more obstacles.There are provisions in new documents that are contradictory and contrary to current law provisions.

Take for example Circular No. 22/2018 / TT-BLDTBXH (replacing the List in Circular No. 03/2010 / TT-BLDTBXH) requiring pre-customs clearance labor safety inspection for groups of products and goods. You can only check when installed, put into operation (such as escalators, elevators). This is an unreasonable regulation, reflected many times, but there have not been any amendments from the relevant agency.

We are still far from the top four in ASEAN in terms of business environment, what is the cause of the above situation?

In different rankings, we have different positions, in the business environment rankings, Vietnam ranks 5th, which means that we are not in the top 4 ASEAN countriesor the position of competitiveness, we are also ranked 7th, there is a very long distance for Vietnam to enter the top four countries.

For each ranking, we have different reasons; we have made great progress in reforming the business environment, but only in some areas such as access to electricity, access to credit, and start-up business, tax payment and Social Security, but regarding some other problems we are slow to change, such as registration and property ownership.

In addition, two areas of justice, which are contract dispute resolution and corporate bankruptcy, seem to be falling behind and behind many other countries. These are the reasons why we have not yet entered the groups of ASEAN 4 countries, although some of our indicators have improved.

For the competitiveness index, we are ranked seventh because competitiveness is a much broader issue covering institutions, infrastructure to human resources, skills, and business operations.

We are hindered a lot in human resources, skills and institutions in the business environment, leading to our limited business capacity. Therefore, our ability to join the group of ASEAN 4 countries becomes even more challenging.

In the future, what will be the driving force to create pressure on business environment reform and what should we focus on?

Recently, the Government has focused on reforms on the factors of business environment and competitiveness because these are the rankings that international investors want to invest in.

A country is often seen if this country is attractive enough to investors or not. On the other hand, we also use the spirit of international practices to reform in the country.On that basis, we will reform business conditions, specialized inspection management procedures, apply IT and non-cash payment reforms. These are areas of issues that we are pushing based on good international practices.

Clearly, there is still a lot of ways for reform and I think this space can focus on issues such as continuing to improve the quality of business conditions.

We have focused on quantity reduction and simplification of business conditions, but here we are going to focus on the quality of each of those business conditions. Besides, new specialized management activities are being carried out in some areas, the management method will be changed.

We will use good international practices, such as risk management methods, to apply them to specialized management activities, thereby helping the business to better comply with the law and to help reduce the pressure on management implementation agencies. Besides, IT application and the implementation of online public services is one of the necessary requirements.

On the other hand, in my opinion, more emphasis should be placed on creating a legal corridor to promote non-cash payments. The lack of a legal framework reduces opportunities to develop new non-cash methods.