Lang Son city strives to improve competitiveness

(LSO) – Lang Son city is striving to increase the Department and District Competitiveness Index (DDCI) to 64 points or more in 2019, up 8.94 point from 2017.

   Improving competitiveness index

According to the DDCI survey for 2018 announced by the provincial Department of Planning and Investment, Lang Son recorded 62.07 points, up 8.94 points from 2017. However, the city was ranked 8th compared to other cities and districts because there were three indexes with lower scores: unofficial costs, fair competition, access to land and stability in land use. The reduction was due to the slow transformation of the city administration to the needs of the business community.

For example, only 5.7 percent of businesses are supported with legal procedures and settlement of disputes, while up to 94 percent of enterprises think that big corporations and State ones enjoy more favour than local private firms. Many businesses reported that they encounter many troubles and it takes a lot of time to implement procedures for site clearance. Besides, land planning has yet to meet the development requirements and there is a shortage of infrastructure.

To reach the goal of increasing competitiveness, the city has directed departments and agencies to focus on improving each competitiveness index, especially the three aforesaid ones. The municipal People’s Committee has worked to increase capacity of officials and public servants as well as published administrative procedures that people, organisations and businesses should follow.

The leader of the city’s Land Fund Development Centre (right) and representatives from enterprises discussing plans for land clearance of the expanded Nam Hoang Dong project.

Hoang Thi Tuyen, head of the planning-finance division of the municipal People’s Committee, said Chairman of the Lang Son municipal People’s Committee Le Tri Thuc has ordered authorities to strictly handle individuals and units who have behaviours of extending the time to address dossiers, causing troubles, and showing bossy attitudes towards people, organisations and businesses. The committee has worked to ensure equal competitiveness for organisations and individuals, and make it easier for them in procedure settlement.

   People-serving administration

With the strong determination of increasing the DDCI in 2019, the municipal People’s Committee issued Plan No.167/KH-UBND on May 24, outlining key tasks and solutions. Building an administration serving the people is considered a key content and a foundation to increase the DDCI.

The committee will push ahead with administrative reforms and create all possible conditions to attract investors while enhancing exchanges and dialogues with businesses in the most effective way.

The administrative procedures will be posted on the city’s portal and at the headquarters of the offices and units that directly handle administrative procedures.
The review and reform of administrative procedures to create the most favourable environment for production and business of individuals and organizations, and legitimate demand of the people, were drastically implemented by the city.

Notably, in the field of business registration, relevant procedures have been simplified, local people only need to show a copy of their identity card, all remaining procedures will be implemented by specialised staff

In the first seven months of 2019, in the field of business registration, as many as 746 business registration documents were processed, including 537 for new and 209 for changes. So far, no records were reported to be processed slowly.

Chairman of the Lang Son municipal People’s Committee Le Tri Thuc said to make a clear change in improving the investment environment, all the eight department and District Competitiveness Indexes are very important. In particular, human factors have been paid special attention by the municipal authorities towards strengthening administrative discipline to serve the people.

Additionally, municipal authorities continues to maintain dialogues with businesses in many forms, take feedback from enterprises in order to handle difficulties facing them in their production and business activities in a timely manner; direct relevant departments and units to acquire and give official feedback to enterprises. At the same time, the city also mobilizes resources to invest in developing and upgrading infrastructure in a concerted fashion, thus attracting more investors.

With its determination and specific solutions, the municipal administration is aiming to achieve the target of increasing DDCI rankings in 2019, striving to turn Lang Son into a reliable destination for investors.

Lang Son’s DDCI has eight component indexes: unofficial costs; fair competition; access to land and stability in land use; business support services; transparency and access to information; legal institutions and security; cost and time; and role of heads of offices.

 

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Lang Son city enhances business climate

(LSO) – So far this year, Lang Son city, the capital of northern Lang Son province has been implementing various solutions to enhance business climate and improve its Department and District Competitiveness Index (DDCI). The Lang Son News speaks to relevant officials about this matter.

Head of the city’s Division of Environment and Natural Resources Le Thi Nhien: “The division has focused on tightening administrative discipline on public servants.”

In 2019, the Division of Environment and Natural Resources implements nine key tasks, with heightened sense of responsibility and tightened administrative discipline in performing duties of public employees being the most important,

Since the beginning of the tyear, the division has assigned specific tasks for its officials in charge of each sector and project. Their performance is reviewed on a weekly basis with plans outlined for the following week.

There was a delay in settling two administrative documents in the first quarter of the year while all documents tasked by higher-level authorities and complaints by firms and people were settled on time from the second quarter to mid-August.

Strict enforcement of administrative discipline has helped the division promote its officials as friendly and responsible servants of the local people.

Nguyen Thi Hoang Anh, who works at the unit receiving and returning results of pulic inquiries under the office of the municipal People’s Committee: “The unit has strived to clear documents without delay.”

The unit has applied a Level-3 public service system and has 44 administrative services reaching Level 4. To facilitate people in acquiring public administrative services, the municipal People’s Committee has partnered with the provincial Post Office to enable people to receive administrative results via post.

Since early 2019, the Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee has requested all the local civil servants to enhance their sense of responsibility and attitude when receiving and settling public administration inquiries from firms and people, and to not trouble people with delays in returning administrative results.

The committee has surveyed satisfaction among people who worked with officials at single-window units through satisfaction rating forms, feedback boxes and online satisfaction rating software.

The survey results will be publicised with a form of reward designed for those with good performance while discipline measures will be adopted for those fail to perform well.

Mr. Doan Ba ​​Nhien, Chairman of Lang Son Business Association: “The city stands side by side with businesses with specific solutions.”

In recent years, the municipal administration has regularly organised dialogues and meetings with businesses to get feedbacks and learn about their problems.

The city should take following steps to improve local competitive edges and business support index and attract more investors – building roads connecting industrial clusters with highways; providing firms with easier access to soft loans, particularly start-up businesses; and focusing more on human resources training, training of skilled workers and supporting firms in training their workers./.