Vietnam's state-owned firms demand more business autonomy
Vietnam's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have called for more business autonomy in order to boost the slow-moving pace of the government's 10-year-old reform process, according to a report of Vietnam News on Thursday.
One of the reasons the process has been moving slowly is that the SOEs are supervised by too many different owners, said Nguyen Duc Tang, director of the Finance Ministry's General Policies Department.
The relationship between the ministries and government agencies that own the enterprises and the businesses themselves is not suited to the market mechanism, he said.
The owners interfere too much in the business activities of the SOEs. The government sets the business directions for the SOEs, which must obtain permission before they can expand or change their operations.
SOE management has not yet been recognized as a career, and their posts are administrative appointments by the government rather than recruitment based on business backgrounds.
Tang said it is now the best time to transfer SOEs into new management models more suitable to the market demands, otherwise the reform process would stagnate and fall short of its target.
The biggest problems have been evaluating the SOEs' assets, and dealing with the state's control of the enterprises' organization and management, noted the report.
Vietnam's equitization process, which began in 1992 after the renovation process was introduced by the government in 1986, changed the face of the centrally-planned economy.
By the end of June this year, as many as 907 SOEs were equitized. The process has been very slow to meet the government's goal of equitizing over 1,319 enterprises, selling or leasing 562,merging 351 and liquidating 368 by 2003.
Xinhua News - November 07, 2002
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