~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

Year :      [2006]      [2005]      [2004]      [2003]      [2002]      [2001]      [2000]      [1999]      [1998]      [1997]

Vietnam in "end game" to join WTO: US trade mission

HANOI - A US trade mission has voiced optimism Vietnam will join the World Trade Organization (WTO) this year but said the communist country must continue to tackle red tape, copyright piracy and corruption. Vietnam, a fast-growing economy of more than 82 million people, is now negotiating joining the WTO and establishing full trade relations with its former wartime enemy the United States, a prerequisite for membership.

"Certainly 90 percent of what Vietnam needs to do to join the WTO has been done," Virginia Foote, president of the US-Vietnam Trade Council, said Saturday. "It doesn't mean that the last 10 percent aren't tough issues. "But a huge amount of work has been done. That's why they're on the fast track to join now. They're in the end game to join now."

A US trade mission of more than 20 corporations who want to set up shop or expand operations in Vietnam has toured the capital Hanoi and business hub Ho Chi Minh City and met top government officials. Leaders of the trade group -- which included Citigroup, Boeing, Ford Motor, General Electric and TimeWarner -- were hopeful that Vietnam would soon conclude technical discussions and become a WTO member.

"We hope that all of these (talks) will be done and out of the way by the time Vietnam hosts the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in November," said US-ASEAN Business Council president Matthew Daley. Foote praised Vietnam's "hard-working, well-educated labour force" and welcomed recent legal and economic reforms and greater transparency. "This year is certainly a crescendo for Vietnam in terms of the international community," said Foote. "But the payoff will come afterwards (depending on) how effectively these reforms get implemented, and how actually welcoming the investment climate is here." Foote and Daley pointed to the challenges of doing business in Vietnam, including bottlenecks at seaports and on highways, slow customs procedures, bureaucratic red tape and corruption. Daley also stressed that Vietnam -- where bootleg DVDs, fashion items and other fake consumer goods are sold openly on street markets -- needs to crack down on copyright piracy.

"We believe that there is a direct connection between having strong intellectual property rights regimes ... and the inclination of companies to move their most advanced technology into a foreign market," he said. Speaking days after the US State Department criticised Vietnam's human rights record, Daley said that issue would likely come up when Congress votes on granting the country Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status. Vietnam started its "doi moi" economic reforms in the mid-1980s and was widely hailed as Asia's next tiger economy in the mid-1990s, but hopes for a boom fizzled even before the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit.

Since then Vietnam's economy has made a comeback, growing at eight percent last year, and the low-wage country is increasingly seen as an alternative investment destination to China, attracting firms such as US chipmaker Intel. Today, Vietnam's move toward becoming a globally integrated market economy and a trade partner of the United States, the world's largest economy, promises an opportunity for Vietnam to prosper, Daley said. "Certainly in the past Vietnam was not considered a premier investment destination, for reasons that all of you understand," Daley told a media briefing. "We think that is changing now, changing very substantially. "Companies that come to invest here are going to compare Vietnam to other countries," he added.

"They're going to want to make sure that the prospects here are indeed as good as you're going to find in other countries, if not better. Otherwise they'll go someplace else."

Agence France Presse - March 11, 2006.