Vietnam has over the past 25 years attracted nearly 211 billion USD
from foreign investors for 14,500 projects, the Ministry of Planning and
Investment (MPI) reported at a conference reviewing 25 years of FDI
attraction in Hanoi on March 27.
“Attracting foreign
investment is a right policy as it has contributed greatly to realising
many important socio-economic development goals in the country,” Prime
Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said at the conference.
MPI reported
that by the end of February, 2013, nearly 100 billion USD of the
registered 211 billion USD foreign investment were disbursed.
The foreign financial source has by now accounted for 25 percent of
total social investment in Vietnam and contributed to over 60
percent of the country’s total export value in 2012.
Foreign
invested enterprises gave 14.2 billion USD during 2001-2010 and nearly
3.7 billion USD in 2012 alone, to the State budget, the Ministry
reported.
Through foreign-invested projects, modern technology,
equipment, expertise and management experience have been transferred
into the country and direct and indirect jobs have been generated for 5
to 6 million workers.
The foreign invested sector has through the
years grown robustly to become an important component of the national
economy, PM Dung said.
The sector was encouraged to develop in a
stable, long-term manner and on an equal footing with other economic
sectors, thus joining in utilising the country’s internal strength and
comparative advantages to make economic restructuring move actively,
Dung stressed.
“ Vietnam has been increasingly favoured by foreign investors and businesses,” he noted.
However, the foreign invested sector has exposed defects needing uniform and overall solutions, the Government leader said.
He referred to the significant imbalance in foreign investment
injected in various sectors, slow investment disbursement, and low
content of high technology and new technology in invested projects.
To
address these problems, “The Vietnamese Party, State and Government
continue improving drastically the country’s investment environment to
draw in more foreign investment and use the capital source efficiently,”
Dung stated.
He pledged that market mechanism will continuously
be perfected, administrative procedures as well as financial and banking
systems reformed, and human resources training and socio-economic
infrastructure improved.
He asked the ministries, sectors and
localities to join by adopting generous incentives for large-scale
socio-economic infrastructure projects, which are able to produce
enormous, positive impacts on the country’s socio-economic growth, and
taking strong moves to invite foreign investors to projects applying the
Public-Private Partnership form.
The ministries, sectors and
localities are instructed to supplement regulations on hi-tech business
criterion, mechanisms to develop the supporting industry and capital and
financial markets, and environmental protection standards.
Foreign investors are encouraged to work with local universities and colleges to train high-quality workforce for the nation.
Approved
socio-economic infrastructure planning schemes will be made public to
enable foreign investors to have wider access to planning information to
serve their project establishment, PM Dung said.
Future
investment promotion activities need to be coordinated on a national
scale to prevent unhealthy competition among localities, he requested.
MPI
affirmed that increasing the quality, not the quantity, of foreign
investment will be a prevailing trend in future foreign investment
promotion.-VNA