Simplified rules boost business registrations in Vietnam HANOI - Simplified procedures for establishing new businesses have seen entrepreneurs throng business registration offices in record numbers this year. Government officials believe this will give a welcome boost to the national economy, but concede bottlenecks remain in its implementation. Business registration offices in many cities and provinces report that, between January 15 and February 15, they received applications at least four times more than the same period before the new Business Law took effect on January 1 this year. The new law replaced both the company law and the private-business law issued in 1990. Between 1990 and 1999 about 38,000 businesses with a total capital of VND21,000 billion (about US$1.5 billion) registered their operations under the two laws - an average of 4,500 per year. Under these laws, businesses were obliged to obtain approval from 13 different bureaucratic desks before they knew the fate of their application. Now they need to lodge all necessary documents at one desk and will receive approval within two weeks. Officials say the surge in applications particularly intensified following Prime Minister Phan Van Khai's issuance of two decrees on February 3 - on new procedures and the abolishment of 84 permits for business operations. Director of the macro-economics management department of the Central Institute for Economics Management, Nguyen Dinh Cung, told Viet Nam News Agency that the two decrees make it clear that eligible businesses will be able to function without much interference from the administration. Cung said the decrees marked a new turn in national economic operations, that of creating greater room for business people in all sectors and providing them with equal footing in the marketplace. In Ho Chi Minh City alone, 361 applications had been made for registering new businesses, while 341 others registered for business expansion and diversification, he said. He said that these figures represented a ten-fold increase over the period before the new law became effective. The Hanoi Planning and Investment Department says that in the first two months of this year, 251 applications were made for registration, a two-fold increase over the same period last year. Cung said the government believed that proper execution of the new business law would be a catalyst for national development, particularly for the private sector. However, he conceded that simplified procedures did not always mean that application forms would be screened quickly. The Government has invested in a new programme for re-training local officials to make them more efficient in handling business registration applications, he said. The programme, implemented by the Ministry of Planning and Investment, will equip local business registration offices with computers that are linked together into a national network. Cung said another obstacle which needed to be dealt with in the near future was that the new law identified just four kinds of businesses but people were actually doing businesses that could not be categorised under any of these. The four kinds of businesses under the new law are limited liability companies; joint stock companies; partnership and sole proprietary concerns. One common type of business that these categories do not cover is the family-owned business, as these are not considered private companies. Over the last decade, private companies and family-owned businesses generated more than 500,000 new jobs. But about 1.5 million families running their own businesses had generated an estimated three million jobs in the same period, and accounted for nine per cent of the national GDP (gross domestic product). Vietnam News Agency - March 8, 2000.