Striving to Present Good Image of Tay Ninh to Domestic and Foreign Investors

Tay Ninh ITPC, established under Decision 40/QD-UBND of the Tay Ninh Provincial People's Committee, is authorized to be a focal point to coordinate to promote investment, trade and tourism of the province.

 

For many years, Tay Ninh ITPC in coordination with other authorities has advised the Provincial Government to adopt comprehensive practical solutions and specific ways such as innovative approaches in management and public administration, administrative reform, and capacity building for staff and public servants. These are significant activities at the macro level, and require the engagement of all levels and sectors.

At the micro level, we work on two groups of activities including: the “traditional” promotion activities promoting investment with foreign partners, boosting cooperation, calling for new investment in the country, organising and participating in domestic trade fairs as well as fostering communication and marketing activities; and innovative promotion activities to support and solve problems for investors and businesses, providing legal information, improving understanding and business management capacity and organising business honour events for outstanding businesses.

 

It is true that the investment achievements at present are not equivalent to the economic development potential of Tay Ninh. Besides the advantages of geography and big economic development potential at border gates, Tay Ninh also has a large working age population, as well as ideal tourist attractions and ownership of natural and mineral resources, extremely favourable conditions for the province to be an economic Centre of the South. It can be said that Tay Ninh is taking great advantages of natural resources and opportunities to foster its economic development strongly and sustainably.

 

To promote the economic restructuring, the province has recently implemented many reforms to improve the investment environment. But compared to some provinces in the area, Tay Ninh province is making slow progress in attracting investment, developing industry and services and is at risk of lagging behind other provinces. The biggest challenge is the internal flaws and weaknesses. The first shortcoming is a limited supply of clean land for investors; currently, it lacks clean and available land for rent to meet the requirements of the investors and the planning and implementation progresses of the industrial parks are too slow. Many of the contents of the policies and regulations related to investment are not attractive and convincing; for example, the investment incentives and compensation rates for leasing are not transparent, specific and practical, which cause drawbacks to invite investors and improve the trade and tourism. The mechanisms and related policies change frequently. Besides, the adoption of the mechanisms and policies of the authorities in many cases is rigid and time consuming; a lack of transparency among some authorities negatively impacts efforts to encourage investors and businesses to invest in the province.

 

More importantly, the province has not had any long-term local marketing plan to adopt and promote its economic development strategies. Besides, the human resources have not met the needs for development; most of the labour forces are blue-collar workers while the number of white-collar workers is limited. Given the current shortcomings, it is easy to imagine what the workforce of Tay Ninh is likely to be in next 10 years’ time.

 

To address these rising problems, timely solutions must be proposed to create investment flows and improve the effectiveness of the investment promotion. However, in upcoming time, based on the action plans of the Provincial People's Committee, the Centre will attempt to develop and implement strategies to promote investment, trade, and tourism more drastically and comprehensively to take the economic development of the province forward to meet its potential.

 

Currently, the Centre is facing limited capacity of staff, who are not professionally trained at schools and most of whom only participate in some short-term training courses and lack experience. This makes it hard to find staff to do high level work requiring multiple skills. The promotion staff and officials lack not only expertise, but also knowledge of some of areas of business, economics, and languages.

 

Therefore, the Centre has established and implemented a series of training courses to improve the technical and language knowledge among the senior staff and other promotion officials and staff of the Centre. Currently, the Centre offers some communication and media courses for spokesmen of the Centre and other higher education programs in economics and languages for other staffs. It is expected that in next 3 years, the staff and officials of the Centre will be able to boost the professional promotion activities for the province.

 

In the future, the Centre will develop and adopt the Investment- Trade- Tourism strategic plan 2020 sharply and widely to boost the provincial economy growth which is commensurate with available potentials. The first and foremost focus of the Centre is on creating and expanding the in-depth domestic and foreign relations activities in wide range. Specifically, we will coordinate with large firms and consulting organizations to organize the integrated promotion campaigns in the key areas of the country and abroad. Besides, we will organize the promotion events to attract investors and tourists, as well as promote trade activities within the regional and international scales. The Centre will also coordinate with functional agencies to develop and implement the plans to promote annual investment and tourism.

 

In addition to the focuses on supporting investors, we will also strive to connect closely with businesses and investors who are active in the province, to timely solve their problems and motivate them in business operation. Besides, we continue to implement the reform of administrative procedures in order to build a good image of Tay Ninh in the eyes of domestic and foreign investors.