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Northern localities to coordinate investment promotion activities
Investment promoters from 30 northern cities and provinces will gather in Vinh Phuc province on Oct. 24 to review their work, focusing on the role of central agencies in promoting investment opportunities relating to trade and tourism promotion activities and diplomatic affairs serving economic purposes.
The organisers said that the conference is a follow-up to a previous conference summing up investment promotion work in southern Vietnam , organised by the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MoPI) in Ho Chi Minh City two weeks ago.
Northern investment promoters are expected to discuss the creation of a coordinating mechanism to develop links between different agencies and localities to assist a range of investment promotion activities.
Increasing professional standards in investment promotion activities and helping agencies adapt to new circumstances are also high on the agenda at the conference, the organisers said.
The Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) stated that recent investment promotion work has had a profound influence on the manner in which the country has attracted and used foreign direct investment.
This work has contributed directly and significantly to spurring the economic growth rate, and promoting both an economic structural shift and international economic integration in the country, the MPI added.
In this regard, the MPI plans to create a strategy for investment promotion alongside coordinating a number of mechanisms to assist promoters of investment, trade and tourism and to encourage investment promotion work and diplomatic activities.
To date, almost all localities nationwide have established their own investment promotion centres to help form a complete central-to-local investment promotion network, the MPI said.
The MPI lauded Vietnamese diplomatic delegations and economic and trade missions overseas for forming a dynamic chain of investment promotion networks abroad.
It unveiled a plan to set up a number of taskforces overseeing investment promotion work in key markets such as the US , Japan , Europe, the Republic of Korea and other ASEAN member countries.
To facilitate investment promotion work, the Vietnamese government has integrated this area into laws dealing with foreign investment, along with issuing a range of relevant documents, including Instruction 56/1988 on the external economy and Instruction 163/1989 on procedures to be followed when seeking foreign investment.
Vietnam has to date signed 51 bilateral agreements relating to investment encouragement and promotion and over 40 agreements regarding double taxation avoidance. It has also signed a host of regional investment accords in a bid to expand the scale of its investment promotion work.
“The times when we aimed to attract foreign investment at any cost have gone. Now, investment promotion work needs to accomplish the dual goal of attracting foreign investment to the country and promoting local investment overseas,” said Head of the MoPI’s Foreign Investment Department Phan Huu Thang.
In the past nine months, Vietnam has attracted more than 57 billion USD in foreign investment, almost five-fold increase compared to the same period last year.
Laws relating to foreign investment were first implemented in 1988. In the 20 years since, there have been 9,569 valid foreign-invested projects with a combined registered investment capital of over 141 billion USD. During this time, Vietnamese businesses have invested a total of 2.5 billion USD in 317 overseas projects.
VNA
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