The bigger businesses are, the more inspections they face, said Dau Anh Tuan, vice secretary-general of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI).
“This goes agaisnt economic rules and discourages enterprises,” Tuan, also director of the chamber's legal department, told the Forum on Repositioning Businesses for Sustainable Development in Hanoi on Thursday.
Tuan said the economy has shown very difficult signals right from the fourth quarter of 2022, when the export growth rate of many industries declined, the unemployment rate increased, and many companies began to lay off workers.
Especially, with unstable global financial markets and challenges from the application of the Global Minimum Tax, Vietnam's competitiveness will increasingly drop, he said.
Tuan cited that in 2022, despite an increase in the realized foreign direct investment (FDI), the registered amount fell, showing that risks have been turned into visible challenges.
A national economy can develop strongly only when there is a strong domestic private sector. However, Vietnam still lacks drastic reforms to support businesses, while having many regulations empowering civil servants to enforce the law.
"Surveys show the more businesses develop, the higher costs they pay for administrative procedures and the more inspections they face. That does not create motivation for them. Meanwhile, under economic rules, the larger enterprises are, the lower administrative procedure costs they pay," said Tuan.
In order to further promote the domestic private economic sector, the VCCI official said it is necessary to speed up the reform of administrative procedures in all agencies and at all levels. This solution will help businesses reduce costs and ensure fairness toward more sustainable development goals.
He also emphasized the need to boost the substantive application of information technology; increase stability and predictability of legal policies; promote the role of markets, including the gasoline market; and devise measures to attract foreign investment.
Lam Thuy Nga, head of large corporate, wholesale banking at HSBC Vietnam, said: “Amid the rapidly changing world, we need to build an environment in which the government has specific guidelines and orientations to help businesses, especially medium and small ones, be aware of the importance of repositioning their business activities through innovation in order to promptly seize new opportunities.”
Businesses themselves must actively learn from each other’s experience as well as from domestic and international consulting organizations; update the world's business and investment trends, new requirements of consumers and advanced technologies to flexibly apply to business activities for improved labor productivity, quality and added value of products and services.
Investing in R&D activities has been proved in many countries as a catalyst for successful innovation, she noted.
Currently, Vietnam is a leading country in the world in importing high technologies. As the world changes, as one of the fastest growing, most dynamic and open economies, Vietnam cannot stand still. “If businesses make good use of Vietnam's unique advantages and move faster, they can create many great values in innovation,” Nga added.