The four principles have been proposed by Dr Nguyen Mai, Chair of the Vietnam Association of Foreign Invested Enterprises VAFIE.
Mai said at a workshop reviewing the efficiency of foreign investment
and discussing the solutions to speed up the disbursement, that the
disbursement rate in the last five years has been stable at 10 billion
dollars per annum. The disbursement rate was kept even in the most
difficult period of 2011. This shows that the investment environment and
the Vietnamese policies to attract FDI remain attractive to foreign
investors.
However, Manh said that in attracting FDI, Vietnam needs to shift from
Asian small and medium enterprises to multi-national economic groups of
Japan, the US and the member of countries of OECD. This aims not to lag
behind the world when implementing all the WTO’s commitments and the
commitments within the framework of the free trade area with ASEAN,
China and Japan from 2012, and in order to avoid becoming a “technology
rubbish dump” of the world.
“In the new period of development, Vietnam needs to prioritize to
attract high technologies industries, advanced services which allow to
create breakthroughs in technologies and help improve the
competitiveness of the country.
If Vietnam applies new technologies in making steel, it can save 40
percent of the energy and reduce 50 percent of carbon emission. The
figures would be 35 and 25 percent for cement production, 80 and 60
percent for printing paper and pulp production.
Vietnam also needs to restrict the labor intensive FDI projects such as
garment and footwear, while giving places for domestic enterprises to
develop the industries. As for big FDI projects, which need high quality
workers, Vietnam needs to make commitments with foreign investors in
terms of the quantity and quality of workers to be provided.
Agreeing with Dr Mai, Nguyen Noi, Deputy Head of the Foreign Investment
Agency, a unit of the Ministry of Planning and Investment, said that a
lot of problems have arisen from the foreign invested projects. A lot of
investors do not have the awareness of protecting the environment,
while many projects use backward technologies. Especially, strike
remains a headache.
According to Noi, the Prime Minister has assigned MPI to compile the
plan on reviewing the situation of the foreign invested sector and
suggest the methods to upgrade FDI in 2011-2020, which needs to be
submitted to the Prime Minister by the second quarter of 2012.
MPI plans to request local authorities to refuse the projects which may
cause environment pollution, and the ones which have small investment
capital but use large areas of lands. The projects, which do not bring
high efficiency, but use a lot of natural resources, backward
technologies which consume much energy will be refused to give places to
the projects that use high and clean technologies, the projects in the
supporting industries.
Le Tuyen Cu, Deputy Director of the Economic Zone Management Department
of MPI, said that the tax incentive policies need to be adjusted to meet
the requirements in the new period of attracting FDI.
Under the current laws, only some business fields can enjoy the highest
preferential levels (the corporate income tax of 10 percent for 15
years).
According to MPI, to date, Vietnam has attracted 13,496 FDI projects
with the total registered investment capital of 195.9 billion dollars.
Of these projects, 65 percent have seen the capital contribution
completed.
Source: Vietnamnet