Toward Sustainable Development

With strong characteristics of patriotism and revolution, and being known as the source of the Tran Dynasty and spirit of Dong A, Nam Dinh province is the birthplace of the workers movement in the early twentieth century and had one of the first Party organisations in the country. For many years, the social - economic development of the province has been marked by achievements, such as: the development of industrial parks around the city, industrial clusters around the suburban areas, and craft villages. Furthermore, the effective mobilisation of financial resources, technologies and human resources has supported Nam Dinh province in the positive development of its economic structure. Accordingly, this is the foundation on which Nam Dinh province will take the next steps of launching new policies and procedures to call for investment in its social - economic development.

 

Identifying the importance of administrative reform, Nam Dinh province has actively realised some appropriate measures, establishing coordination mechanisms for the purpose of simplifying administrative procedures. Therefore, a comprehensive reform of administrative procedures, especially relating to investment procedures, is a firm goal of the province authorities.

 

Annually, Nam Dinh province has established mechanisms and policies for investors with higher and higher preferences. As the result, there are currently 10 preferential investment fields, other preferential policies, such as: tax, land rent, financial support for infrastructure construction, and a list of 35 projects appealing for investment with estimated capital of more than US$ 1 billion.

 

Regarding to the evaluation of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Nam Dinh province is a leader in progress and quality of “one-stop” procedure implementation in every authority level, following the regulation of Decision 181/QD-TTg dated 04/9/2003 of the Prime Minister. In this term, the “one-stop” mechanism of Nam Dinh City will become a pattern for the country.

 

Looking at the overall results of administrative reform, investment field reform is particularly clear and has shown an open attitude to attract investors. Specifically, the “one-stop” facility of the Department of Planning and Investment was set up in 2009 and is responsible to implement “one-stop” procedures. From here, when enterprises, subsidiaries and representative offices register their businesses, they only need to come once to apply for all necessary procedures and return to get the result. The “one-stop” facility has to contact and directly complete all procedures with other relevant authorities.

 

Till the end of September 2011, there were 296 investment projects with total capital of over VND 52 trillion and US$ 90 million in the province. In fact, these successful achievements resulted from the administrative reform activities, and simplification and shortening of investment procedures. This result was highly agreed by enterprises and investors. In terms of social - economic development, Nam Dinh province has determined that investment attraction shows an important key in upgrading infrastructure.

 

In 2011, despite global economic turmoil and the high domestic inflation rate, Nam Dinh province implemented a breakthrough on mechanism and investment procedures and increased the provincial competitiveness capacity.

 

On 13^th July 2011, Mr Nguyen Van Tuan, Deputy Secretary of Provincial Party and Chairman of People’s Committee, organised a meeting with relevant authorities in order to propose that they implement further reform and preferences for investors. At the meeting, after revising current procedures, Nam Dinh province ratified a measure about the duration of handling investment procedures. With this result, the duration of solving investment procedures was shortened by about 30-50 percent, making Nam Dinh province a leader in shortening the time of investment procedures.

 

At the end of August 2011, the People’s Committee of the province arranged a convention to open a dialog with authorities and enterprises about the solutions to enhance the provincial competiveness index (PCI). At the end of 2010, with a PCI of 55.63 points, 3.03 points higher than in 2009, Nam Dinh province stood at 45^th place among 63 provinces and cities, 10 places higher than in 2009. This is the first time that the PCI of Nam Dinh province is in the fair group after 4 years of being in the relatively low group.

 

Pursuing improvement in investment attraction, in October 2011, People’s Committee of the province established incentive policies to attract high-tech investment projects with huge investment capital, preferential procedures, financial support and preferential policies for investing in rural areas. Along with that, People’s Committee encouraged investors to overcome difficulties and take every opportunity to improve production performance, business and contribute to social - economic development.