Officials from international agencies including the World Bank, EuroCham, AmCham, AusCham…all agreed that Vietnam is facing the toughest-ever challenges and worsening business outlook.
“Vietnam has faced the toughest-ever challenges such as high inflation, hefty trade deficit, fluctuations in forex rates and the slumping stock market,” Martin Rama, the World Bank’s Country Director in Vietnam told the Vietnam Business Forum held Dec 1 on threshold of the Consultative Groups of Donors’ Meeting.
Speaking about the global gloomy outlook, Thomas O’Dore, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) said Vietnam’s economy will be facing with similar problems as exports, which account for more than half of its GDP value, are declining due to shrinking purchasing power in the U.S., EU and Japan.
The U.S. buys up to 26 per cent of Vietnam’s exports, EU purchased 19 per cent and Japan imports 16 per cent, Thomas O’Dore said.
Vietnam should boost productivity and cut production costs, and the government of Vietnam should create favorable conditions for exporters to borrow loans with appropriate interest rates, Alain Cany, chairman of EuroCham proposed.
Meanwhile, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC)’s Chief Representative Matsuda Noriyasu said that cheap laborforce no longer is teeth of Vietnam, and Japanese companies are concerned over underdeveloped infrastructure networks.
Out of surveyed 620 Japanese firms, 78 per cent of them complained about road systems, 60 per cent about power supply, and 45 per cent about seaport situation.
A recent survey by the Secretariat of the Vietnam Business Forum also showed that numbers of local firms complained about bad quality of the business climate soared to 30 per cent, up from 5.3 per cent in 2007.
Officials at the VBF proposed the government of Vietnam further boost reforms in infrastructure developments, intellectual property rights, courts systems, efficiency of the public administration and high-quality human resources.
However, Trence Francis Mahony, an official for the equity market team said that Vietnam is better at dealing with impacts of the global crisis than other Asian nations in 1997.
“Vietnam has its own strengths and not much impacted from the current crisis, and it has long-, and medium-term outlooks, shrunk investments will be traded off,” he said. (Local sources)
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