On Tuesday, municipal People’s Committee Chairman Huynh Duc Tho and Vice Chairman Ho Ky Minh jointly chaired a seminar entitled ‘Improving Da Nang’s Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI)’.

The seminar in progress

Da Nang finished 2^nd in the Viet Nam’s PCI for 2017, after Quang Ninh Province-the most competitive locality in the country last year. Previously, Da Nang had topped PCI ranking for 4 consecutive years from 2013 to 2016.

Addressing the event, Vice Chairman Minh highlighted the significance of developing a business community in the city in order to ensure the sustainable socio-economic development.

Over recent years, numerous effective measures have been taken by the local authorities to encourage and give more assistance to businesses to expand their investment and business activities.

The focus has been on issuing a coordination mechanism between the local departments and agencies for dealing with administrative procedures relating to investment, business registration, and urban building and management aspects. In addition, administrative procedures relating to taxes, lands, construction and customs have been simplified, whilst the time taken to deal with these procedures has been shortened. Hence, the city authorities have won the trust of the business community.

However, there are some shortcomings in the management of business environment in the city. Vice Chairman Minh urged local businesses to take full advantage of opportunities, especially golden ones APEC offered, to overcome their difficulties and together build a stronger business community in the future. Da Nang is setting its target of enhancing its competitiveness, and making it an international-scale dynamic and creative city.

Many participants in the seminar showed that potential risks of securing land use rights and the transparency of business environment are the most concerning problems which have negatively affected the city’s PCI ranking.

Therefore, local businesses asked for help from the city authorities to facilitate them to access bank loans, accelerate administrative reforms, and issue more incentive policies for private enterprises. Also, heed should be paid to providing consultancy services about business-related policies and rules, improving the transparency, openness and competitiveness in business activities, fighting against corruption, reducing land lease fees, and offering more land to local businesses.

In his closing speech at the event, municipal Party Committee Secretary Truong Quang Nghia underlined the importance of improving the transparency and equal competitiveness, and enhancing the ability of information access. The purpose is to help the city improve its PCI ranking and effectively implement its key campaign ‘2018: The Year of Investment Promotion’.