According to a report from the MPI, the country currently has 416 industrial parks and more than 1,000 industrial clusters, contributing around 50 per cent of the country's export turnover.

According to Dr. Phan Hữu Thắng, former director of the MPI’s Foreign Investment Agency, though industrial parks have a major contribution to promoting economic growth and improving the quality of social security, there remain many problems in their development and management.

For example, planning of industrial parks in some localities is not close enough to the real development needs and the ability to attract investment capital. In addition, the current model for such parks needs to be further innovated to encourage the development of eco-industrial parks and urban-service industrial parks.

There remain many difficulties in developing green industrial parks though the government issued Decree 35/2022 NĐ-CP for the management of economic and industrial zones in 2022.

The management of industrial zones faces challenges including regulations and orientations for the development which can overlap into many different legal areas, such as land, construction and environmental regulations.

According to some of the enterprises, though they have strongly supported ecological industrial parks and a circular economy to encourage sustainable development, in reality, investment in industrial parks is still very difficult due to complex and overlapping legal regulations.

They're calling for a law with clear and detailed regulations on eco-industrial parks so as to encourage enterprises to invest in these types of parks.

Under the MPI’s proposed law, incentive policies are expected to promote the development of those industrial parks which meet the requirements of the country’s industrialisation and modernisation, and international new trends such as green, digital and a circular economy.

The incentive policies will focus on highly specialised and smart industrial parks, which can attract new investment fields such as those supporting the digital and green economies, chips, semiconductors, and innovative material industries.

Under the law, the MPI has also proposed preferential policies related to taxes, fees and capital investment in these zones.

MPI’s Deputy Minister Đỗ Thành Trung said they also aimed to amend and supplement regulations related to administrative procedures under the proposed law.

The new regulations would be earmarked as experimental measures to create more favourable conditions for investors in industrial zones in particular and draw on experience to improve the business investment environment across the country in general, Trung said. — VNS