Northern localities to coordinate investment promotion activities

Hanoi (VNA) - 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.-