Phan Đức Hiếu, deputy head of the Central Institute of Economic Management (CIEM)

Việt Nam has gained success in reforming business conditions over the past seven years. However, the nation has not reached its target at being one of the top four ASEAN business environments.

Phan Đức Hiếu, deputy head of the Central Institute of Economic Management (CIEM), speaks to Vietnam News Agency about those issues.

What has Việt Nam gained from reforming business conditions over the past seven years?

Việt Nam has gained positive results after seven years implementing resolutions cutting business conditions. This includes reducing the issuance of business conditions among ministries and sectors.

Before, ministries, sectors and even some localities issued many business conditions.

However, from 2016 until now, the Government has regulated that only the Government and the National Assembly have the right to issue business conditions.

After seven years, Việt Nam has gradually removed thousands of unreasonable and unnecessary business conditions, cutting unreasonable requirements for enterprises.

What are the key tasks in the reform of business conditions this year?

The reform of business conditions this year still follows the world standards on improving the business environment. The Government will take the world's ranking in business condition reform to be the measure of success or failure for this reform in Việt Nam.

However, there are some new points in reforming those business conditions. The first task is that the Government will focus on promoting business condition reform.

This year, the Government will have specific requirements for reducing business conditions. For example, the Ministry of Finance is requested to amend Decree 139/2016/NĐ-CP on licence tax. This is different from the tasks in 2019 that the Government permitted ministries and sectors to actively implement reforms themselves.

The Government will also pay attention to cutting time and costs for enterprises in administrative procedures. This is an important factor in assessing the success of business environment reform.

Although ministries and sectors have made efforts, Việt Nam's business start-up index is still very low. What can Việt Nam do to achieve the goal of improving the ranking of this index by 10-15 places?

According to Resolution 02 on improving the business environment and national competitiveness for 2019 through to 2021, to reform procedures of the market entry, Việt Nam needs to cut unnecessary procedures. At present, market-entry has eight procedures that take 17 days to implement with unnecessary costs. Only cutting these procedures will improve the ranking of this index. Since the beginning of this year, there have been positive moves in improving administrative procedures on market entry.

Specifically, the Government issued Decree No 22/2020/NĐ-CP on amending and supplementing articles relating to the licence tax. This helped businesses participate in the market easier and cut the cost of market entry by VNĐ2 million.

The Ministry of Planning and Investment has been amending the Law on Enterprises to cut unnecessary procedures relating to seals or tax declaration procedures. This will improve the ranking of Việt Nam's market access index.

There are many laws with business conditions. That has created barriers for businesses. What is the Government doing to solve this problem?

The Government has requested ministries and sectors to review their own business conditions and then propose removing them. That method has gained success.

However, there are many unnecessary business conditions that need to be cut. Therefore, we need to set up an independent authority specialising in reviewing and proposing cuts of business conditions.

Besides that, to become one of the top four ASEAN countries in best business environment, Việt Nam needs to reform the business environment in ministries and sectors at the same time. The other thing key is to tighten administrative discipline. VNS