Hanoi (VNA) – The 2017 year-end session of theVietnam Business Forum (VBF) opened in Hanoi on December 12.

The event, an annual dialogue between the Government andbusiness community, was co-organised by the Ministry of Planning andInvestment, World Bank, International Finance Corporation, and VBF Consortium.

Opening the forum, Minister of Planning and InvestmentNguyen Chi Dung said 2017 marks significant moves by the Government in buildinga favourable business climate, citing the issuance of Resolution 19-2017/NQ-CPon enhancing business environment and national competitiveness, and Resolution35/NQ-CP on supporting growth of enterprises toward 2020.

The year was earmarked for the implementation ofbusiness-cost-cutting measures, he said. According to the official, dialoguesbetween authorities at different levels and enterprises were frequently heldthroughout the year, with public agencies and sector working to simplify administrativeprocedures and facilitate business operations.

In the first 11 months of 2017, 116,000 new firms wereestablished, registering over 1 million billion VND (44 billion USD) incapital, up 14.1 percent and 42 percent from last year, respectively. Meanwhile,24,000 companies resumed their business during the period.

Chairman of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry(VCCI) Vu Tien Loc pointed to existing difficulties and to the numbers of11,000 dissolved firms and of 55,000 others suspending operation during the11-month period. The figures represented respective annual increases of 3.3 and3 percent, he said.

Administrative procedures were still a big obstacle tobusiness performance. A VCCI report on the 2016 provincial competitiveness indexshowed that 35 percent of the surveyed companies spent at least 10 percent oftheir time to handle these procedures, which one every four of them consideredthe biggest difficulty to their operations.

Loc suggested the Government, public agencies and sectorsfocus on completing the list of conditional business sectors, simplifying theprocedure of specialized inspection, and cutting costs for businesses.

Hirohide Sagara, Co-Chairman of VBF Consortium's ManagementBoard, acknowledged economic progress Vietnam achieved after joining the WTO inforeign investment attraction, living standards improvement, and market economybuilding.

At the same time, he said concerns remainrelated to the apparatus’ transparency, efficiency, and labour productivity, hesaid, adding that the VBF year-end session aims at tackling these concerns forbetter growth of the private sector in Vietnam.-VNA