Viet Nam to host 2008 Vesak Buddhist celebration

Viet Nam’s capital city of Ha Noi will host for the first time the fifth International Buddhist Conference and the United Nations Day of Vesak (UNDV) in May 13-17, 2008, the UNDV International Organisation Committee (IOC) announced on Nov. 10.

The Vesak celebration, the most important Buddhist festival, marks Buddha’s birthday, his attaining Enlightenment and his entry into Nirvana.

The festival, known as the Buddha’s Day, aims to spread a message of love, peace, harmony, mercy, and progress to the world.

According to Venerable Prof. Dr. Le Manh That, IOC Chairman and Deputy Director of the HCM City-based Viet Nam Buddhism Institute, more than 4,000 Buddhist dignitaries and scholars from over 70 countries will participate in the event.

An IOC conference in Ho Chi Minh City on Nov. 8-9 decided the 2008 Vesak festival and workshop will be themed “Buddhism for an equitable, democratic and advanced society”.

The IOC Chairman said the festival will honour the cultural values of Buddhism and Viet Nam.

A workshop on Buddhism in the Digital Age will also be held, aiming to set up a Buddhist network of electronic cultural atlas initiative (ECAI), which will maintain archives of and present Buddhist heritage and traditions, and exchanges of information, documents and boost cooperation between Buddhist countries.

CPV/VNA 11/11

Top-ten PCI 2007 provinces proclaimed

The Việt Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) made public the Việt Nam Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) 2007 on November 08.

The top-ten localities include two northern provinces (Lào Cai, Vĩnh Phúc), two central ones (Bình Định, Đà Nẵng) and six southern (Bình Dương, Vĩnh Long, An Giang, Bà Rịa - Vũng Tàu, Đồng Tháp and Hồ Chí Minh City).

According to a report made by the VCCI’s Legal Department, PCI of an average province increases by 3.2 points (from 52.4 to 55.6). An increase of one PCI point means that the province’s new investment per capita goes up by 2.5 percent, revenue per enterprise by VND 4.2 million (or US $253), and GDP per capita by 1 percent.

To obtain a strong and sustainable PCI growth in the following years, the VCCI put forth four 4 solutions: to narrow the development imbalance among different groups of provinces; to speed up the institutionalization of business activities run by individual households; to improve efficiency of the equitized State-run businesses; and to analyze methods to help people-run enterprises earn bigger benefits from reforms relating to the Việt Nam-US Bilateral Trade Agreement and WTO commitments.

The Government Website 9.11

Viet Nam told to step up rural development

The international community has asserted the need for Viet Nam to revise the strategy for developing the agricultural sector as a senior official admitted that the sector is nowhere near to achieving a sound pattern of sustainable growth.

Australian ambassador to Viet Nam Bill Tweddell told an international conference on 9 November that a new action plan with a more comprehensive approach to agricultural and rural development was needed.

The Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Development (MARD) International Support Group Plenary 2007, held in Ha Noi on Wednesday, was expected to pool domestic and international experts’ opinions on how to develop the sector.
The ambassador said the plan should canvass and absorb the views of all concerned parties including the government, finance sector, investors, and more importantly, rural communities themselves.

MARD Deputy Minister Bui Ba Bong said that Viet Nam’s rural areas have progressed dramatically since the doi moi (renewal) process, but farmers remained the poorest sector of the population and many challenges still lay ahead.

These included high poverty and unemployment, serious environmental pollution, and a growing gap in income and living conditions between rural and urban areas.

Bong also noted that "farmers continued to practise an obsolete mode of fragmented production, thus reducing yield and rendering their produce more vulnerable to market turbulence".

"Some fundamental growth elements of the agricultural sector such as land and labour have diminished while the potential for investment, research and the application of developments in agronomic science is still limited."

Bong agreed that a development strategy for the agriculture sector for the next five years needed to be people-oriented, and that rural people’s activities and their complicated interelations, social and cultural issues and living environment should lie at the centre of any such strategy.

A report released by MARD showed that the ministry’s new approach to developing the rural areas to 2010 includes shifting the rural economy towards a non-agricultural base and promoting an ownership spirit among rural communities.

Viet Nam’s agricultural sector is reported to grow by 4 per cent a year on average, and maintain an annual export volume of 5 million tonnes of rice. In 2006, agricultural exports earned $7.4 billion.

Thanks to the constant increase in exports over the past two decades, the country’s poverty rate has fallen by an average of 2 per cent each year.

VNS 10.11

Local lawyers taught to deal with WTO disputes, told to settle early

The ability of Vietnamese laywers to deal with international disputes has increased greatly, according to the director of the Ministry of Justice’s Legal Support Department, Nguyen Van Thao.

At a workshop in Ha Noi on Thursday held by the Multilateral Trade Assistance Project II (MUTRAP II) and the Ministry of Justice to improve the awareness of lawyers, business leaders, and State officials of WTO dispute settlement procedures, MUTRAP II director Tran Thi Thu Hang suggested this improvement was no small accomplishment.

"Dispute settlement procedures are complicated not only for Viet Nam but also for developed countries such as the US or EU. They require parties to have both knowledge in commercial laws and legal procedures of a country and of the WTO as well," said Hang.

"Viet Nam is a new member of the WTO, and our lawyers have not yet gained much real-world experience or a very deep knowledge of dispute resolution," said Ho Thuy Ngoc, a professor of law at Foreign Trade University.

As case studies, workshop participants discussed some representative dumping disputes that have affected Viet Nam’s interests.

According to European laywer Paolo Vergano, one of the strategies in dispute settlement in the WTO is to settle as soon as possible.

"In fact, around three-fifths of all disputes are settled before a panel ruling and most of them even before a request for a panel is made," Vergano said.

The private sector was usually involved, formally or informally, in shaping WTO member countries’ priorities and setting the agenda of national interests, he said, allowing businesses to play an important role in initiating and resolving disputes in the WTO.

Third-party participation was also possible, allowing WTO members with interests at stake to use such participation as a method to further build capacity regarding the dispute settlement mechanism.

"A developing WTO member can also launch a case together with a more experienced WTO member to gain experience of the procedures, the preparation of submissions and rebuttals and other factors relevant to an appeal," said Vergano. 

VNS 10.11

VN now an easier place to do business: WB

It is much easier for businesses to access credit in Viet Nam thanks to improved regulations and the growth of joint stock commercial banks, economists said November 9.

A report by the World Bank, entitled Doing Business 2008, said Viet Nam has carried out reforms to now allow out-of-court enforcement of collateral. The country has also expanded the range of assets that can be used as collateral.

"Now a company can use both existing and future assets to secure a transaction," said Justin Yap, private sector development specialist at the World Bank and International Finance Corporation.

The strong expansion and diversification of services by joint stock banks, especially in HCM City and the southern provinces, has also given small and medium sized businesses greater access to loans.

This year’s report ranks Viet Nam 91st out of 178 countries and territories in the world for the overall ease of doing business; up three places on last year. Credit for businesses and protection of investors were the two areas that saw the most reform this year, the report said.

Dinh Van An, director of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), said the report is in line with other similar reports on the business environment in Viet Nam, though it "does not reflect a complete picture of ‘doing business’ in the country, as its title suggests".

The report covers 10 issues, from starting a business and employing workers to getting credit and paying taxes.

"In Southeast Asia, Viet Nam is often ranked below the Philippines and Indonesia in terms of the business environment. However, in this report, as well as other recent international reports, Viet Nam has outperformed these two countries, which is a good news for us," An said.

However, Viet Nam is well below its neighbours such as Thailand, which is ranked 15th, Malaysia, 24th, and China, 83rd. Singapore secured top position in the world for the ease of doing business.

The report, updated to June 2007, does not reflect administrative reforms to the implementation of the Enterprise Law and Investment Law of 2005, which further eased difficulties in starting a business, said An. In fact, in most provinces, it often takes only 5-7 days to register a business, compared to 14 days as in the report.

In terms of the ease of starting a new business, Viet Nam is ranked 97th, because, according to the report, to start a business, entrepreneurs must go through 11 procedures, which take on average 50 days to complete.

Le Dang Doanh, senior economist and former director of CIEM, said in reality, starting a business here was much easier. As soon as a business got its seal, most of the procedures that followed could be carried out simultaneously, so it actually took fewer days than reported.

Doanh noted that laws should be adjusted for a better labour market. In Viet Nam, it is too easy for an employee to quit a job, while sacking an employee is the opposite, he said.

According to the report, the dismissal of a worker cost on average 20 months of wages; only 32 countries have higher costs.

Justin Yap said Viet Nam performed quite well in some areas. "Registering property costs only 1 per cent of the property value - one of the lowest rates in Asia and the world," he said.

However, Viet Nam performed poorly in paying taxes, which reportedly takes a company on average 1,050 hours, with most of the time spent on registering the taxes properly.

VNS 10.11

Nearly 70,000 workers sent abroad

Việt Nam has sent 69,700 laborers, including 22,300 females, to work abroad since the beginning of this year.

According to the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, the figure represents 86.2 percent of the country’s yearly target.

Malaysia, Taiwan, the Republic of Korea and Japan remained Việt Nam’s largest markets, recruiting 49,492 Vietnamese guest workers in the reviewed period.

The country has also worked hard to expand markets to the US, Australia and Canada, which offer various kinds of jobs and high incomes.

The Government Website 7.11

29 countries and territories increase investment capital in VN

For the first ten months of 2007, Việt Nam has attracted a total foreign investment capital of US $11.26 billion; 29 countries and territories have increased their capital to expand business in Việt Nam.

During this period, throughout the country, 300 supplementary projects have been registered, with an increase of investment capital of US $1.5 billion. The Republic of Korea (RoK) continues to rank first among 50 countries and territories investing in Việt Nam, possessing a capital of US $2.44 billion, accounting for 25 percent of the total registered capital.

In October, many localities attracted some large-scale projects from multinational groups, such as a Vespa motorbike factory worth of US $45 million by Piaggio (Italy) and a US $500-million laptop producing project by Intelligent Universal, a member of Taiwan Compal Electronic Group, in the northern province of Vĩnh Phúc; the US $360-million Hệ Dưỡng cement mill with the productivity of 3.6 million tons/year (Ninh Bình Province); and the US $284-million Việt-Hàn Project on golf courses, malls and residential quarters, a joint-venture between BB Đại Minh Company Ltd, Bridge Securities Company (RoK) and other RoK investors (Long An Province).

The turnover of foreign-invested businesses was estimated to reach US S4.5 billion in October. These enterprises have attracted more 13,000 laborers, increasing by 11.7 percent against the same period last year.

To further attract foreign investment capital in the remaining months, the Ministry of Planning and Investment proposed competent agencies perfect the market economic regime as well as “one-stop-shop” mechanism to facilitate the issuance of investment certificates and investment management.

The Ministry also highlighted the upgrading of communication network, seaports, telecommunication services, electricity and water supply to lay a good foundation for business and production activities.

The Government Website 7.11