Efforts for Sharper Competitiveness

With favourable natural conditions and abundant resources, An Giang province has a lot of favourable advantages for agricultural production and processing of agricultural and aquatic products and foods, particularly rice, fish and vegetables. Currently, its rice acreage covers 250,000 hectares with three production seasons. More than 35 rice varieties are being planted in the province, of which 70-80 per cent are high quality. Vegetable crops are also a strength of An Giang province, with an area of 38,000 hectares, harvesting 900,000 tonnes a year. The locality has also set up crop specialised farming areas for planting green beans, soybeans, okra and some other legumes. Also, An Giang catches 300,000 tonnes of aquatic products a year, including catfish, snakehead, perch, tilapia, prawn and eel. Nearly 50 per cent of farming areas meet GlobalGap, ASC and other standards and over 90 per cent of output is used for export processing. The province currently has 17 enterprises with 23 export aquatic processing plants with a combined capacity of 400,000 tonnes a year, of which value-added processing capacity reaches 5,000 tonnes.

 

Beside agriculture, tourism is also defined as a key economic sector of the province. An Giang presently has many famous tourist attractions and unique festivals, enabling it to develop various types of tourism such as ecotourism, community tourism and religious tourism - pilgrimage. Therefore, the tourism sector of An Giang has been gradually shaped a friendly image to tourists far and wide, improved service quality, invested in tourism product diversification, and protected the environment.

 

Geo-economically, An Giang is an economic and trade hub interconnecting Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho and Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and is an important gateway of the country and Mekong Delta provinces and cities with Cambodia and other ASEAN member countries. Therefore, An Giang has certain advantages in border economic development. The province's border gate economic zones presently cover 26,583 hectares, including Vinh Xuong (9,916 hectares), Khanh Binh (7,412 hectares) and Tinh Bien (9255 hectares). Cross-border trade revenue has grown at a stable pace, particularly with Cambodia.

In its socioeconomic development orientation, An Giang's economic development will be spurred by agricultural development, agricultural industrialisation and modernisation, rural development and agricultural restructuring with a focus placed on raising productivity, quality, efficiency and competitiveness and building a green economy to provide a development platform for trade, service, industry and construction. Besides, economic development must be linked to national defence and security and frontier stability and the province must solve the relation between economic growth and cultural and social development, achieve social progress and justice, environmental protection and adaptation to climate change for sustainable development.

 

To effectively exploit local potential and advantages, An Giang province has determined to ameliorate the investment and business environment and raise competitiveness to create an enabling environment for businesses to invest in production and business development, thus helping it achieve socioeconomic development objectives, create jobs for workers and raise people’s livelihoods. Mr Le Van Phuoc, Director of the Department of Planning and Investment, said, in addition to being given general incentives stipulated by the Government of Vietnam, investors in An Giang province are further endowed tax incentives and land rent support at the highest level in the framework provided. It has also given priority to carrying out support policies to help investors to fulfil administrative procedures quickly, particularly investment registration and business registration, in addition to support for human resource training.

 

The province has achieved encouraging results in investment attraction. In the 2011 - 2015 period, An Giang granted investment certificates to 212 domestic projects with a total investment capital of VND27,021,411 million and 33 foreign-invested projects with US$226,841,520 of registered capital. In the first nine months of 2016, the Provincial People's Committee approved 49 domestic investment projects with VND13,815 billion, 27 projects and 3.6 folds of investment capital (9,988.8 billion) more than the same period of 2015. The provincial government also agreed on one fresh FDI project and allowed one project to add US$15 million of investment capital. To date, An Giang has 37 effective FDI projects capitalised US$213,459,980, of which US$76,153,937 has been disbursed.

 

To achieve better results, An Giang province will continue to apply policies and measures to improve the provincial competitiveness index, carry out the Resolution 19 and Resolution 35, Commitment on Business Support with VCCI. Particularly, public administration reform is considered a key task to create a favourable and equitable business environment for all organisations, enterprises and citizens to do business. Accordingly, the province set up the Business Support Committees at provincial and district levels while trying to streamline processes and apply one-stop single-window mechanism to administrative procedures to reduce the waiting time for enterprises and investors. The province has also allowed investors to simultaneously carry out different procedures such as land lease, environment, construction and fire safety papers and made administrative procedures public and transparent at public service agencies and on electronic portals of the province.

 

An Giang province will allow projects to be carried out ahead of land planning if the land is available, and it will adjust land planning later, even though it is agricultural land. It will actively create handy land funds for future projects and keep land rent rates unchanged for at least five years. It will try to contact and hold dialogues with businesses and investors to capture their difficulties and obstacles to timely take suitable troubleshooting measures to facilitate them develop their business operations and make them feel assured with their projects in An Giang.