Hanoi has been putting measures in place to improve its ranking among Vietnam’s top business-friendly localities, and has now joined the top ten of Vietnam’s provincial competitiveness index (PCI) ranking for the first time in 2018.
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The result has exceeded original target of being included in the top 10 PCI index ranking by 2020 set by the municipal People Council, stated Toan, attributing the success to the fact that Hanoi has always been the pioneer in activities to build a government of service which supports businesses in every steps.
Toan referred to previous remark of Chairman of the Hanoi People’s Committee Nguyen Duc Chung that the satisfaction of enterprises and citizens has been identified as the gauge in the operation of Hanoi’s governance.
The PCI report, jointly launched by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has been announced annually since 2005 to assess the ease of doing business, economic governance, and administrative reform efforts by the provincial and city governments in Vietnam in order to promote the development of the private sector.
Vu Tien Loc, chairman of the VCCI, commented the recognition shows strong efforts from Hanoi to realize its potential as one of Vietnam’s economic hubs and also of the ASEAN in the future.
Addressing shortcomings
The PCI 2017 report pointed to certain areas that Hanoi had to focus on, including “Land Access & Tenure”, “Policy bias”, “Entry Costs”, and “Law & Order.”
Following this year’s report, improvements were shown after firms gave the city administration high marks for minimizing entry costs, especially one-stop-shop business registration.
This was made possible as 100% applications for business registration can be processed online, while the processing time for administrative procedures has been reduced to within three working days, and in some cases to two days.
Starting August 2018, Hanoi has waived the cost of setting up new businesses and provided training courses for individual households on start-up and corporate governance.
Additionally, 71% of firms in Hanoi said state employees understood their technical responsibilities (compared to 57% in 2017), and 86% rated state employees as friendly and hard-working (compared to 53% in 2017).
The share of firms waiting more than three months to complete procedures for business operation declined from 17% in 2017 to only 5% in 2018.
In 2018, Hanoi also promoted business dialogues at the district level, creating an effective channel to find out and address business issues for greater transparent and competitive business environment.
This is clearly reflected in the 2018 PCI results: 67% of firms felt their business concerns were settled by the local government in a timely manner (a 10-percentage-point increase over 2017) and 87% of firms reported being satisfied with the way local authorities dealt with paperwork (a 22-percentage-point improvement over 2017).
With regard to “Land Access & Tenure”, the completion rate of citizen’s first time application for land certificate and registration in 2018 reached 99.4%, while the administrative processing time regarding land issues was reduced to 12 working days, including land issuance certificate from 30 to 14 days.
Information regarding master planning has been published online for greater transparency and citizens’ better access.
For the “Law & Order”, the municipal Justice Department has been more active in providing legal support for the business community, at the same time facilitating the progress of civil judgment execution, building higher trust from the public towards the efficiency of the legal system.
