HCM City aims at higher position in PCI rankings

HCM City (VNA) – Officials of Ho Chi Minh City held a meeting on April 11 in an effort to improve the city’s Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI), which dropped from the 6th in 2015 to the 8th last year.

Vice Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee Tran Vinh Tuyen urged swift actions to better HCM City’s PCI ranking, especially the sub-indices with lower points. 

Local departments and agencies must focus on the sub-indices of land access, informal charges, policy bias, pro-activity of provincial leadership, and legal institutions, he noted.

Although businesses’ land access was among the five sub-indices with higher points, from 5.18 points in 2015 to 5.45 points in 2016, the modest increase shows that this sub-index hasn’t been improved substantially, according to Tuyen.

In terms of informal charges, he requested leaders of municipal departments and agencies to have more dialogues with and listen to businesses while stepping up the provision of online services to minimise direct contact, thus cutting red tape and saving time and expenses for enterprises.

He also called for businesses’ coordination through turning down civil servants’ unregulated requests.

Regarding policy bias, the Vice Chairman said HCM City will promptly establish an enterprise support centre to help solve difficulties facing businesses.

He also asked municipal officials to review businesses’ feedback to find out the cause of the dissatisfaction with the administration’s performance, which led to a worse pro-activity index.

As legal institutions saw the biggest drop last year, from 5.04 points to 4.25 points, relevant agencies must immediately set up supervision mechanisms to ensure that all opinions of enterprises will be settled in an appropriate manner. They also need to review economic disputes and accelerate the enforcement of civil judgments so as to solidify businesses’ trust in the city’s law protection agencies, he added.

Nguyen Hoang Minh, Deputy Director of the municipal Department of Planning and Investment, said although HCM City’s PCI ranking in 2016 fell from the previous year, its average score increased by 0.36 point from 61.36 to 61.72 points.

More than 36,000 companies were set up in the city in 2016, a year-on-year rise of nearly 14 percent. The local business environment was also highly valued at international economic forums, he noted.-VNA