USAID Assists Vietnam Evaluate PCI

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is supporting the government of Vietnam to conduct a project to evaluate the Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) in 60 cities and provinces nationwide.

 

The project has sent 30,000 questionnaires to firms in the targeted localities, asks private enterprises to evaluate the quality of governance based on nine criteria, including the dynamics of local leadership, access to land, informal charges and transparency. 

 

The PCI is a USAID-funded project that has been conducted through the Vietnam National Competitiveness Initiative (VNCI). The PCI assessment ranks provincial governments' performance, capacity, and willingness to develop a friendly business environment.

 

The index measures economic governance by comparing advantages and disadvantages in infrastructure, human resources, market size and location in order to evaluate the competitiveness of provinces on an equal basis.

 

In a related development, USAID and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) jointly signed a cooperative agreement on promoting information technology (IT) application to improve the competitiveness capacity of Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in December 2005.

 

USAID is a non-government organization, whose projects give priority to healthcare, education, children, HIV/AIDS patients, and business development.