VietNamNet Bridge – The Government needs to adjust many of its roles and functions if wanting to achieve a healthier socioeconomic development, experts recommended at a conference held in Hanoi on Thursday.

Citizens assess quality of public services

The conference held by the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) discussed draft visions and roadmaps for the Vietnamese Government until 2020.

Nguyen Minh Thuyet, former deputy head of the National Assembly’s Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children, said the first thing that should be done is to separate the State Bank of Vietnam from the Government to create an independent monetary agency.

“The current mechanism is that the State Bank of Vietnam prints money whenever the Government demands. I think the bank should work independently from the Government so that inflation can be controlled more effectively,” Thuyet said.

In addition, the relationship between the Government and enterprises needs to be reconsidered. In other countries, their governments do not directly manage enterprises but create the legal corridors and business environment, which is not seen in Vietnam, according to Thuyet.

“The Government handles so many things, and if this keeps going on, the country cannot develop,” Thuyet said.

Sharing the same opinion, CIEM director Le Xuan Ba said that the laws currently place too many tasks on the Government’s shoulders.

The report on the Government’s visions showed that there were more officials of lower ranks dodging their responsibility and passing the issues within their jurisdiction to higher-ranking agencies for decision, leading to an overload at the highest rank namely the Government.

Meanwhile, expert Le Dang Doanh said that Vietnam should develop in a healthier way as recommended by international organizations. Citing land withdrawal and allocation as an example, Doanh said “making a person a billionaire by land compensation while others empty-handed is a big challenge to social development and justice.”

According to Grayson Clarke, author of the report, Vietnam has developed in a way which is similar to picking fruits from low-hanging branches after the economic innovation. However, some low-hanging fruits have been picked in a large volume and some others have disappeared while numerous institutional challenges have occurred.

Clarke said that it was necessary for Vietnam to accelerate the reform progress and renew the immutable role of the Government as a leadership agency in general as well as the role of State-owned companies in particular as regulated in the Constitution 1992.

The failure in reform may mean that Vietnam will continue to be prosperous in the short term but face slowdown or decline in the long run, he warned.

Experts mentioned other solutions such as checking tasks of the Government, improving public services, reducing the number of decrees and circulars, building a system to evaluate working efficiency of officials, paying salaries based on capabilities and boosting anti-corruption prevention.

“We hope that the report will serve as a recommendation for the people and the Government to be aware of what needs to be done to have a healthy and clean Government,” Ba said.

Source: SGT