HÀ NỘI — HCM City officials held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss what steps to take to improve the city’s Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI), which dipped last year.

The city slipped to the eighth position in 2016, after being sixth in 2015.

Trần Vĩnh Tuyến, vice-chairman of the municipal People’s Committee, urged for swift action to lift up the city’s PCI ranking, and said the city must work to improve the sub-indices that earned lower points.

Local departments and agencies must focus on the sub-indices of land access, informal charges, policy bias, pro-activity of provincial leadership, and legal institutions, Tuyến said.

Though land access for businesses was among the five sub-indices with higher points – it rose from 5.18 points in 2015 to 5.45 in 2016 – the rise was very modest, indicating that this sub-index has not improved substantially, Tuyến pointed out.

Regarding informal charges, he asked heads of all municipal departments and agencies to hold dialogues with and listen to businesses while stepping up the provision of online services to minimise direct contact, thus cutting red tape and saving time and expenses for enterprises.

Tuyến also called for businesses to co-operate by turning down civil servants’ informal requests.

To resolve the issue of policy bias, he said HCM City would immediately set up an enterprise support centre to help solve difficulties that businesses are facing.

The vice-chairman has also asked civil servants to review feedback from enterprises and determine the cause of dissatisfaction with the administration’s performance, which led to a lower pro-activity index.

Legal institutions index saw the biggest drop last year, from 5.04 to 4.25 points, so all concerned agencies must immediately set up supervision mechanisms to ensure that the viewpoints of businesses are considered appropriately. Officials must review economic disputes and accelerate the enforcement of civil judgments so as to improve the business community’s trust in the city’s law protection agencies, he added.

Nguyễn Hoàng Minh, deputy director of the municipal Department of Planning and Investment, said that though HCM City’s PCI ranking in 2016 fell from the previous year, its average score has risen by 0.36 points, from 61.36 to 61.72 points.

Around 36,000 companies were established in the city in 2016, a year-on-year rise of 14 per cent. The local business environment was also highly valued at international economic forums, Minh pointed out.

HCM City should also conduct its own research and surveys on its investment environment based on ground-level realities in order to take timely steps to overcome its problems, he suggested. — VNS