Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) and USAID - funded Vietnam Competitiveness Initiative (VNCI) have announced annual brief reports on provincial competitive index (PCI) in Vietnam in 2006. Many rankings have changed.
Knowing strong points and weak points of each province
A total of 6,300 private enterprises giving feedbacks to the survey showed that Vietnamese enterprises regard PCI as an effective tool to expose their assessments about the business environment and help authorities of all levels to further improve the business environment. Ten indexes to constitute the PCI were used in the investigation questionnaires. Apart from last year's eight indexes, the PCI was added legal institution and labour training indexes.
This year, the PCI was divided into six groups: very good, good, quite good, medium, quite low and low. The newly introduced very good group comprised of Binh Duong and Danang. The good group was for provinces with four good constituents of private economic development policy, transparency, labour training and pioneering activeness. The quite good group included provinces with acceptable constituent indexes. The medium and quite low groups have the similar criteria as the quite good group. The low group was used for provinces where enterprises were displeased with business environment and behaviours of local authorities.
Reasons for downgrading or upgrading
In general, there were no big changes in rankings compared to last year. However, several localities still had big changes. For example, An Giang jumped from the 34th position to the 9th, Ninh Binh (42 to 18), Ho Chi Minh City (17 to 7) but Hanoi dropped from the 14th position to 40th, Ben Tre (4 to 26), Thai Binh (8 to 37) and Dong Thap (21 to 11). Which are the reasons for the ranking changes?
Hanoi, a typical case of degrading, only had transparency index raised while other indexes fell drastically. Not only indexes of market joining fee and land approach dropped deeply but also the indices of activeness of the authorities and private economic development policy still stayed quite low.
Mr. Huynh said, to increase general indexes, provinces and cities should focus on improving absolute indexes in individual constituents. This will enable those provinces to reach the maximum 100 points. In theory, all provinces or cities can reach 100 points if they know how to apply the current reality in Vietnam in a good way.
Nguyen Thoa
Vietnamese
