Less than a week after taking office, Prime Minister Le Minh Hung set a deadline for ministries and sectors to submit plans to cut business conditions, reduce compliance costs, and prioritize resources for institutional improvement. 

Those drastic directions show a clear message: To achieve double-digit growth, Vietnam cannot continue to move slowly in reform. Cutting sub-licenses, removing legal bottlenecks, and building institutional trust for the private sector are no longer things that should be done, but things that must be done to unleash resources and pave the way for sustainable growth.

For example, businesses wanting to change the purpose of using raw materials in petroleum business activities must have written approval from the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT), according to the Draft Circular detailing a number of articles of the Decree on petroleum business.

What worries businesses most is that the draft does not specify when approval is granted, when it is rejected, what the approval criteria are, or what the dossier entails.

In reality, slow procedures are not just a few additional administrative costs. For a business, a three-month delay can mean losing a business season, losing market opportunities, and losing competitive advantage altogether.

The reforming of business conditions is not simply about cutting a few sub-licenses but about how the State manages the economy.

The 1999 Law on Enterprises for the first time established a landmark principle: Businesses have the right to business freedom in everything not prohibited by law. That change caused thousands of types of licenses to be automatically abolished in the early 2000s.

In 2014, the Law on Investment continued to create a long step forward when, for the first time, the list of conditional business lines was issued along with the law, clearly identifying that only the National Assembly has the right to change that list. Thousands of business conditions once again expired.

However, to this day, the country still has 198 conditional business lines and 4,603 business conditions.

The Government no longer accepts the familiar inertia of the apparatus.

The Prime Minister's way of framing the problem shows a different spirit: Not just requiring cuts on paper, but demanding substantive efficiency that businesses can feel.

The goal is also very specific: Cut 30 percent of the number of conditional business lines, reduce 50 percent of compliance time and costs, and abolish all business conditions that are no longer appropriate.

That figure shows that this is no longer a minor technical edit but a major general review with very real implementation pressure.

Nguyen Dinh Cung, former Director of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), once said that if ministries are asked to self-review to remove business conditions in the fields they manage, it would be very difficult to be thorough, because it is no different from telling them to reduce their own powers. 

That is why business environment reform for many years has been slow. When an old license disappears, a new one appears under a different name.

Nguyen Dinh Cung believes that it is not simply a matter of changing a few regulations, but changing the management method, from tools and organization to implementation capacity; in other words, changing the entire system.

The most important thing is not how many business conditions are cut, but whether businesses have to perform procedures fewer times.

Hence, Hung emphasized that cutting the number of business conditions is important, but they must truly reduce compliance time and costs. The number of cuts may not be many, but they bring great efficiency.

This is a very notable change in reform thinking.

The measure of reform does not lie in the number of documents crossed out, but in how many months faster a business opens a factory, how much compliance cost a household business saves, and whether an investor has to seek fewer signatures.

The Politburo’s Conclusion 18-KL/TW has also clearly pointed out the direction: Strongly shift the state management method from pre-inspection to post-inspection, associated with building standards, technical regulations, and economic-technical norms, and strengthening inspection and supervision.

Dau Anh Tuan, Deputy Secretary General of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), proposed applying the “one-in, one-out” principle, meaning every new business condition must be accompanied by the abolition of at least one equivalent unfavorable old condition. This is a thought-provoking approach.

Tu Giang