Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam
Some 550 delegates attended the National Youth Entrepreneurship Forum 2022 which was organized by the Central Committees of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union (HCYU) and the Vietnam Youth Federation (VYF) in Hanoi yesterday.
With the theme ‘Youth start-ups and the country recover and develop after the pandemic’, this year's forum aimed to promote entrepreneurship and develop the country, creating an environment for Vietnamese youth to participate in the post-Covid-19 economic recovery and development. In addition to the efforts to create a breakthrough over the past time, the delegates raised many challenges for start-up activities.
Attending the forum, Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam expressed his wish that the spirit of entrepreneurship should spread amongst young people. The State and ministries must create more favorable conditions for young people to start up so that Vietnam will have 1.3-1.5 million enterprises by 2025.
According to Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment Tran Duy Dong, those wanting to start their own business are facing several difficulties including slowly promulgated legal provisions creating a legal corridor for start-up activities. The Decree 38/2018/ND-CP detailing investment for creative small and medium-sized enterprises (Decree 38) still has problems and has not been updated.
Vietnam currently has about 20 innovative start-up investment funds, but most of them are small in scale, with a total capital of about VND100 billion, so they need to expand and attract more foreign capital flows. Worse, research and development expenditures are still small in comparison to other countries, accounting for only 0.37 percent of the country’s GDP.
From an objective perspective, the World Bank supposed that the Vietnamese government should remove some problems with many problems at the macro level regarding the innovative start-up environment.
According to WB, the first challenge is related to the vision and role of leaders at all levels. Despite the remarkable growth in the number of businesses participating in the startup ecosystem, Vietnam still lacks a consistent approach to creating a common brand for startups. The Government needs to train civil servants so that civil servants can have a better service attitude toward entrepreneurs.
Many startup business representatives recommended that relevant ministries and sectors should have more practical support, from creating an open legal corridor to building an open mechanism to create more favorable conditions for businesses, especially in the first few years of starting a business.
Regarding proposals of facilitation for foreign capital, Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment Tran Duy Dong said that he would advise the Government to amend Decree 38 in the direction of creating a legal corridor for investment activities. Regarding the attraction of high-quality human resources to work legally in Vietnam, Deputy Minister of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs Le Tan Dung said that there are currently nearly 100,000 foreigners working in Vietnam as managers, executives, experts, and high-tech workers.
The Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs is reviewing regulations and studying to propose amendments to Decree 152 on the management of foreign workers to facilitate the provision of visas and work permits for high-quality human resources to work in Vietnam. The representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also said that it will coordinate with the Ministry of Public Security and ministries to facilitate the procedures for applying for a permit for foreigners to work for more than one month in Vietnam.
