Comments on USSâ€s Monitoring Mechanism on Vietnamese Apparel and Textile

 

 

In couple with legal reform at high speed will expose certain risks to weak or unclear legal documents. Given the example of Notarisation Law, a law institutes grounds for real estate and securities transactions - the backbones of the developed economies and growth guarantee. Although the Law on Notarisation took effect in 2006, instructive documents have not been issued and the result is an unclear definition of the roles of notaries, which leads to the slowness in transactions and causing certain instability in the execution of signed transactions.

Accounting for more than 3 per cent of US garment and textile import revenues, the Vietnamese apparel and textile industry is impossible to make an impact and is certainly unable to pose a threat to the US garment and textile industry. Moreover, more than 95 per cent of US apparel import is readymade products and is not made by the US-based companies for years by virtue of high product costs and labour shortage. The irrationality of this mechanism has caused seriously adverse and long-term impacts on the Vietnamese garment and textile industry. Many customers have cut down orders and are preparing to withdraw from Vietnam in case the US Department of Commerce has negative judgements in the first period of monitoring, which is expected to fall on August 2007. This may bring more than one million people working for the garment and textile industry and their families to poverty.

 

 

We suggest that the Government of Vietnam to intensify the process of issuing and implementing laws and regulations in accordance with its WTO accession commitments. Many documents in this field have been built and several decrees and decisions have been promulgated to carry out WTO commitments but we see lots of unclear and even contradictory points in many important issues. It is necessary to disseminate WTO-related information to state officials who directly work with enterprises.

 

In addition, Vietnam needs to add more efforts in sketch out detailed plans for industrial infrastructure like electricity production, seaport, expressways and others.