The Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) has played important role in developing the business community in particular and the national economy in particular. VCCI has carried out many activities to extricate difficulties for enterprises, contribute opinions to lawmaking and organise missions to accompany Prime Minister’s visits among others. All these activities are the bridges for Vietnamese enterprises to establish investment and commercial relations in the integration process. This is the viewpoint of Mr Mai Thanh Hai, Chairman of Vietnam Association of Foreign-invested Enterprises and Member of VCCI Board of Management. He also put forth proposals for the operation of VCCI in the coming time to promote its representative role for the Vietnamese business community.
You said VCCI always attaches much importance to extricating difficulties for enterprises. In your opinion, how will VCCI need to do this job better?
Since the start of this year, the galloping inflation caused serious difficulties for Vietnamese enterprises, especially small and medium-sized ones. This leads to production and export stagnation. Before such difficult contexts, I think VCCI needs to quickly instruct member enterprises to apply specific solutions to overcome the hard time. Those measures are much more practical and meaningful than meetings with impractical proposals.
In international economic cooperation promotion, VCCI needs to open centres or representative offices in major markets, which will help enterprises to approach those markets more easily and reduce market expansion costs.
Vietnamese enterprises are enduring the pressure of higher input costs and fees. They will be at a disadvantage in competition if they have to pay greater fees than regional rivals. I wonder VCCI can conduct surveys on input costs to find out solutions to diminish burdens on domestic enterprises. In addition, VCCI should organise cost-related surveying programmes in neighbouring countries like China. The costs need to be looked at all industries like energy, land, water and transport. Then, it will summarise and make a report to submit to the government for further instruction.
Do you have any proposals to improve operations of VCCI in the upcoming term to contribute more to the development of the Vietnamese business community?
The representation of the business community before the government is the top concern of the business community. VCCI needs macro instructive policies and orientations for enterprises, listen to their opinions, help them to seek solutions to difficulties and send their opinions to the Government. Then, it will send government’s feedbacks to the business community. VCCI also needs to be more active in contributing opinions in the Government’s Action Programme.
On the other hand, VCCI must accelerate cooperation with provinces, cities, central and local authorities to a new high. This is necessary for both sides. Local authorities are weak at managing, operating and assisting enterprises while VCCI has professional and capable specialists.
One of the most outstanding activities of VCCI is the valuation of competitive capacity and credit index. What do you think about this activity?
VCCI has built the annual provincial competitiveness index (PCI). I think this model should be developed to build up a corporate crediting system, which will help enterprises to improve their operations. On the other hand, this result is also used for market research, development or cooperation activities. However, VCCI needs to pay more attention to preparatory activities to have more accurate results for surveyed localities or enterprises to fully recognise the results. On the other hand, the valuation criteria should be changed to adapt to the social and economic change. VCCI also needs to use several other auditing instruments to increase the accuracy of the PCI ranking list.
Thank you very much!
Huong Ly
Vietnamese
