Quang Ninh province is moving ahead with the $7 billion plan to turn Van Don into a liveable city in Asia Pacific in the next 10 years.

To be able to attract capital, Quang Ninh is planning to apply solutions, including the hiring of foreign consultants and using foreign managers in some economic fields in Van Don. Hiring foreigners and appointing them to heads of economic zones is applied at many special administration zones in the world.

Quang Ninh’s plan to hire foreigners for the important posts has caught the special attention from the public, especially when the National Assembly’s members removed the ‘lifelong official’ regime to exclude unqualified officials from the state apparatus.

Hiring foreign managers is not a new idea in Vietnam.

At Techcombank, five members of the management board are foreigners, and VP Bank has two foreign deputy directors.

A big real estate firm, when joining the education and automobile manufacturing sectors, has hired two foreigners, one the former CEO of General Motors and the other from Cornell University in the US.

However, this is new for the state-owned economic sector and state agencies.

Therefore, some analysts say that Quang Ninh may have to follow a ‘very long path’ to implement its plan to hire foreigners to work as consultants and managers.

HCM City once planned to attract special talents in 2014-2017, but it did not reap success.

The biggest obstacle is the compatibility in relations between foreign managers and management bodies at higher levels.

Foreign managers have the task of bringing optimal economic benefits to enterprises, but they must follow the state’s directions.

This proves to be an impossible mission for many foreign managers, who are used to work in an open economy.

Second, a question has been raised whether Vietnam has sufficent qualifications, methods and tools to measure the performance of foreign managers. If the answer is ‘not clear’, how can Vietnam assess the performance of the managers and how to pay them?

Lawyer Truong Thanh Duc from Basico Law Firm said the state should assign enterprises to undertake the works they can do and enterprises will choose the managers suitable to them. The State should not take on too much work.

Linh Mai

Labor Ministry projects monthly salary of $3,000 for SOE chairs, CEOs

The monthly salary offered to chairs and CEO of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been described as ‘too low’ compared with the managers of private enterprises. However, many workers still compete for the posts.