At the launching ceremony in Hanoi on October 29th, 2013 (Photo: VOV)
(VOVworld) – The World Bank’s Doing Business 2014 report has said that Vietnam strengthened investor protection and improved access to credit to make doing business easier for local firms between last July and this June.
At a launch ceremony in Hanoi on Tuesday, Webdy Werner, investment climate advisory services manager for East Asia and the Pacific at IFC, said that under the report from 2005, Vietnam has implemented 21 reforms – the highest number in the East Asia Pacific region – to facilitate better conditions for businesses.
Webdy, who is also a member of the World Bank Group, added this was the biggest number of reforms in East Asia and the Pacific. This year, Vietnam is ranked 99 out of 189 economies, signaling that the country needs to do even more in order to improve its position on the list, especially in adopting international best practices in the regulation of businesses.
Webdy said that in recent years, Vietnam had strengthened investor protection by introducing greater disclosure requirements for listed companies in cases of related-party transactions. Nan Jiang, co-author of the World Bank’s Doing Business 2014 report, says: “We actually see some areas where the country performs quite well. For example, in the area of giving construction permit, Vietnam is ranked 29th place…..But at the same time, we can see challenges in some of other areas that are also very important to the daily life of local business. For example, if we look at the area of getting electricity where Vietnam is ranking 156th place in the world, we find that it takes some average 115 days for a business to get the first time electric call connection and the cost of connection is about 1700% of average person’s income. That is very costly compared to other countries.”
According to the report, across the globe, Singapore continues to provide the world’s most business-friendly regulatory environment for local entrepreneurs, followed by Hong Kong, China. In the past year, 15 of 25 economies in the region implemented at least one regulatory reform making it easier to do business.