VietNamNet Bridge – A lot of decisions have been made and many drastic measures have been applied to show the strong determination of local authorities in creating perfect investment environments to attract investors.

It is expected that the Bac Ninh provincial people’s committee would issue a decision stipulating the responsibilities of the heads of the agencies in charge of dealing with enterprises’ matters in January 2013, according to Dau tu.

The principle of the decision is that the heads of the agencies must bear full responsibility to the local authorities, if the proposals and petitions of enterprises cannot be dealt in order as stipulated in the current regulations.

This means that the investors in Bac Ninh province can be certain that any petitions they send to the local authorities would get replies after a certain amounts of days. This also spells that relevant agencies will have no reason to ignore the proposals from enterprises, no matter the proposals relate to the enterprises’ business affairs, or the ones relating to the state’s policies.

With the decision, the Bac Ninh provincial authorities try to persuade investors that all the authentic investors would be welcomed here, while the local authorities would listen to them, answer them and help them.

Nguyen Phuong Bac, Deputy Director of the Bac Ninh provincial Planning and Investment Department, believes that the new regulation would settle a lot of problems at the same time.

“In the past, heads of agencies usually got slow in dealing with enterprises’ proposals, reasoning that they could make decisions until their subordinate officers provided sufficient information to them for reference,” Bac said.

“However, with the new regulation, there would be no excuse for the agency heads any more, if they cannot fulfill their tasks,” he added.

Commenting about the new model to be applied in Bac Ninh province, some analysts said this would put a hard pressure on the high ranking officials in the locality which would help accelerate the process of improving he business environment there.

They went on to say that though Bac Ninh would still need to deal with a lot of technical problems to implement the policy, the message conveyed by the provincial authorities would bring high hopes to businesses that they would be able to do business in a fair playing field, and that they can take the straightway instead of taking roundabout to their goals.

An Ninh Thu Do has cited a report by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) as saying that the majority of businesses have never suggested their opinions to any legal documents of any new policies set up by the local authorities.

VCCI has found out from its survey on 8200 businesses nationwide that 12.61 percent of businesses once or several times suggested their opinions. The others kept quiet because they feared that the suggestions would make the relations between them and local authorities worse, which would badly affect their business. Meanwhile, some businesses thought that they should not waste their time giving suggestions, because the suggestions would be ignored by the local authorities, while things would not get better.

In fact, in some localities, enterprises can ask for direct meetings with the high ranking officials of the local authorities to discuss their problems. However, this method can be applied only by big enterprises, or big investors, who make great contribution to the local economic development.

Dau Anh Tuan, Deputy Head of the Legal Department of VCCI confirmed that small businesses would keep quiet if they think they don’t have the relations close enough to the local authorities.

Compiled by C. V