Attracting Investment to Change Central Highlands Face

The Central Highlands, also known as Tay Nguyen, has rich potential and advantages of land, forest, hydropower, natural minerals and tourism for social and economic development. In the past years, the Central Highlands has always taken special care of the Party and the Government and the strong support and assistance from the entire nation to obtain historic achievements in many fields. To “wake up” the potential of the Central Highlands, the Party and the Government has introduced many policies and solutions to add more resources to step up development investment. This forum is one of the initiatives to seek opportunities and call investments to the Central Highlands to create more favourable conditions for regional development. We expect to make this idea come true and attract more investors to the Central Highlands in the coming time.

In recent years, the Central Highlands economy has experienced high growth and is seeing the increase of industry and service in its GDP and a decline in agriculture and forestry. The self-subsistence agriculture has been oriented to commercialised production. Farming areas are rearranged and crops are introduced to boost productivity and economic value. The industry is powered up by more factories processing cashew nuts, cassava, coffee, rubber, cotton and timbers. More power plants enable the region to replace obsolete electric systems in urban zones and send the light of electricity to rural areas. Regional provinces have invested in traffic, irrigation, post, telecom and socioeconomic infrastructure. They also attach economic development with social security.

 

The Central Highlands has rich potential and advantages but they are not fully exploited to become driving forces for regional development. The region is inferior to other localities in many aspects like infrastructure, living standards and human resource quality. One of the reasons for inferiority is human resource shortage; thus, investment plays a crucial role in the Central Highlands. The region needs active support in finance, policy and special regimes from the Central Government to solve infrastructure matters, especially traffic, irrigation, industry and tourism service, and to boost key areas like mining, processing industry, tourism, rubber plantation, husbandry and hi-tech agriculture.

The Central Highlands has rich potentialities and strengths but it is located far from the country’s economic centres, with unfavourable traffic conditions and limited internal resources and human resources for development. Many local people are still living in poverty. To create a momentum for development, we propose the Central Government to apply special policies and regimes for the Central Highlands region, especially in finance to solve infrastructure problems and create a driving force for attracting investment capital for development. Priorities should be given for investment into small-scaled rural traffic projects, irrigation projects and essential infrastructure for production, land planning, housing and forestry, and creation of new jobs. The region focuses on reducing poverty, heightening intellectual level of the people, developing culture, education and health, and taking care of health of the people, especially minority people.

The local governments must help enterprises to ensure harmonious benefits of investors and localities and must see investors and enterprises as a mainstay for socioeconomic development. They must improve their governance, accelerate administrative reforms and create good legal corridors to attract more investors and administer investment projects. They need to invest in changing production practices and living habits of the minority people and choose suitable business types for local people to escape poverty. Then, the Central Highlands region will have enough resources to get a facelift.