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HCMC lacks conditions to become financial center
Conditions crucial for a financial center have yet to emerge in the city, neither are they in the offing, especially in areas of infrastructure, manpower, and legal corridors, experts said at a seminar on this topic here on Friday.
Much greater efforts are needed if the city government is determined to strive for that goal, especially the autonomy in financial matters as well, they said.
Dominic Scriven, Director of Dragon Capital, said that a financial center like London or Singapore must have certain important conditions, such as traffic infrastructure.
“Traffic infrastructure is also very important. Remember it takes less than 20 minutes to go to the airport from the center of Hong Kong and Singapore,” he said.
Tran Ngoc Tho at the HCMC Economics University said that conditions elsewhere in the world for a financial center are of high standards.
The Securities Industry Association in the United States for example requires a financial center to have such basic factors as transparent and fair financial market, free capital flow and convertible currency, and a fair tax system among others, he said. However, those conditions have still yet appear in HCMC.
Local enterprises in the city still do not observe national standards, let alone international ones, Tho said as an example.
“State-owned enterprises of the city do not strictly announce financial reports under national standards but the city government still has not taken any punitive measures against them. Furthermore, centrally-owned State enterprises are still beyond the city’s jurisdiction,” Tho told the seminar.
Experts at the conference also said that the city government would face many difficulties to develop HCMC into a national or regional financial center, firstly because of its limited power in financial matters, as the city has to obey to central authorities’ judgement.
Tran Minh Tuan, Deputy Governor of the State Bank of Vietnam, concluded that HCMC and central authorities had a lot of things to do in the future to develop the city into a financial center.
VietNamNet, SGT
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