Public Administrative Reform Lags behind Economic Growth

Public administrative reform in Vietnam has long been the top concern of the people, businesses, and domestic and foreign investors. The priorities for public administrative reform in the 2006-2010 period and vision to 2020 told at the seminar on this matter jointly held by the Public Administrative Reform Steering Committee and the UNDP exposed several noteworthy solutions.

 

Mr. Thang Van Phuc, Deputy Minister of Home Affairs cum Secretary General of Pubic Administrative Reform Steering Committee, said that although the public administrative procedures have been checked and modified on the simplification basis, it is still too slow and effective, failing to catch up with the requirements of the renovation process, social economic development ad international economic integration. Notably, the institutional system is asynchronous and inconsistent

 

The asynchronism of the institutional system is found at the timely issuance of laws and decrees but late issuance of instructions to guide the implementation of the laws and decrees. In addition, the public administrative procedure has not been comprehensively streamlined and the publicity and transparency remain low.

 

The state administrative apparatus is still overlapped with the presence of 26 ministries and ministry-equivalent units, and 13 organs under the Government. The centrally run administrative machinery remains to large and the internal organisation size tends to swell up.

 

According to Subinay Nandy, UNDP Deputy Resident Representative in Vietnam, the public administrative reform is a prerequisite for Vietnam to take the full advantage of the international integration.

 

Mr. Thang Van Phuc said the public administrative reform is at an important point in time. In the past, the Government regarded the acceleration of the public administrative reform is a top priority. Recently, Prim Minister Nguyen Tan Dung required collecting public opinions for the “Stepping up public administrative reform, improving state management efficiency” project before submitting to the 4^th conference of the Central Party Standing Committee in a few weeks.

 

Mrs Pham Chi Lan, a senior economic advisor, emphasised the importance of renovation of the state administrative machinery as a quick and synchronous way to catch up with and to serve the market economy in Vietnam. One of the important roles of the public administrative reform is to remove barriers to the development of businesses in order to raise the national competitiveness.

 

According to the Public Administrative Reform Steering Committee, the tasks and solutions of public administrative reform in the next five years are to continue speeding up the decentralisation of public administrative management between central and local levels, between local governments and branches and sectors; and to restructure the apparatus of the Government, ministries and local governments under the orientation of “Compact but strong State and Big Society” model as in other countries.

 

On the other hand, Vietnam will merge several ministerial-level organisations and organs under the Government into ministries. This is possibly a common principle to rearrange ministries and to remove overlapped functions. At the same time, it is necessary to bring in IT applications to public administration management in order to gradually set up an e-government to raise efficiency and effectiveness of the guide and management of the Government and administrative bodies at all levels.