MPI: Vietnam to Open Services Markets to Foreign Investors
The Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) has just announced a package of eight measures to spur foreign direct investments including possibly opening markets of several services to foreign investors earlier than its WTO commitments this year and next.
The MPI said opening “markets” in cultural, healthcare, post-telecom, maritime and aviation sectors to foreign investors will help speed up infrastructure development, a bottleneck of Vietnam’s economy amid the global economic downturn.
The ministry said Vietnam will focus FDI on infrastructure development projects including railways, expressways, seaports, mining, and energy and logistics projects.
It also added it will solve shortcomings regarding paperwork to speed up approvals for those projects.
“Top priority now is a focus on disbursements,” the MPI said.
Tomorrow the ministry will hold a meeting with the Ministries of Transport, Finance, state-owned corps and banks to discuss measures to boost implementation of transport projects under BOT and BT models.
Due to the global economic downturn, Vietnam’s FDI in January sharply dropped by 8.5 folds on year to US$200 million and all projects are small scaled.
Last year, the Asean country recorded US$64 billion registered FDI projects. (Vietnam & World Report)
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