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| For the first time, Hai Phong has taken the top spot in the Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI). |
"The new king" of Hai Phong
Hai Phong Party Secretary Le Tien Chau was the focal point of the 2024 Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) announcement ceremony. Hai Phong has achieved something that no other locality has been able to do in the past seven years: changing its name to occupy the top position in the PCI.
At the announcement ceremony, when naming the "new champion" of the PCI 2024, the Chairman of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), Pham Tan Cong, mentioned Hai Phong's successes in economic growth, attracting investment, and the story of its transformation, effort, and innovation.
Over the past 20 years, since its initiation and implementation by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) in 2004, the PCI has been considered an annual dialogue between the business community and local authorities. It is a forum where businesses can frankly voice their experiences, and where the government listens and acts. Therefore, the PCI ranking can also be seen as a score that businesses give to the quality of the local government's "listening and acting."
Clearly, from the perspective of businesses, Hai Phong is being rated best among provinces and cities in the 2024 survey. Notably, 7 out of 10 areas of governance in the city were recognized by the business community as having significantly improved compared to 2023, including areas that were not easily satisfactory to businesses such as access to land, transparency, informal costs, fair competition, government dynamism, legal institutions, and security and order.
Even with the market entry index, where Hai Phong currently has the highest score at 8.72 points, improvement is not simple, as this index is heavily supported by the government 's efforts to reform market entry regulations over the past 20 years, has a relatively high average score, and depends heavily on specific initiatives and implementation capacity of local authorities.
Therefore, the journey to achieve these figures is what the VCCI Chairman and PCI experts truly want to share.
The story of relentless innovation.
The vitality of the PCI lies in the continuous emergence of reform models from provincial governments. Examples include the "one-stop shop" model for market entry, centralized public administrative centers, business cafes, and the Departmental, Sectoral, and District/County Government Assessment Model (DDCI)... which are being adopted by many localities as a competitive tool for the business environment. All of these originate from the ranking competition in each PCI cycle and are referred to as "exemplary models."
When Hai Phong first achieved the runner-up position in the PCI ranking (in 2021), it also contributed to the collection of good examples in the PCI by publicly signing commitments between the government and businesses regarding support and reform initiatives. For example, commitments included proactively contacting businesses to provide detailed guidance on necessary documents if they were unsuitable, ensuring businesses did not have to make more than one trip to supplement documents, and reducing the processing time for many procedures by more than half compared to central government regulations. Along with signing these commitments, Hai Phong requested the press and businesses to monitor their implementation.
Regarding this year, Mr. Le Tien Chau shared that, right from the beginning of the term, the Resolution of the 16th Party Congress of the City Party Committee identified improving the investment and business environment, focusing on promoting administrative procedure reform, building e-government, and improving the quality of public service of the administrative apparatus as a breakthrough solution to achieve high growth targets and complete socio-economic tasks.
"The city has issued many administrative reform plans; thoroughly implementing the assignment of specific tasks linked to the individual responsibility of each official and Party member, following the principle of clear person, clear task, clear time, clear responsibility, clear output, and clear authority," Mr. Chau said.
In 2024, Hai Phong achieved 100% of administrative procedures being processed at the one-stop service center; published a list of administrative procedures and made them publicly available on the online system; waived or reduced fees and charges for online public services; deployed a dedicated network, ensuring 100% connectivity of wards and communes with the information system for processing administrative procedures, aiming towards building a digital government.
In particular, Mr. Chau mentioned the team of officials and civil servants who are disciplined, creative, decisive in action, dare to think, dare to speak, know how to act, dare to innovate, and dare to take responsibility for the common good; maintaining unity, upholding the exemplary conduct and responsibility of leaders.
"The PCI index has become an important tool to help Hai Phong innovate its governance thinking, improve administrative efficiency, disseminate reform lessons, build local brands, and especially serve as an effective monitoring tool, reflecting the voice of businesses to the government, thereby helping to evaluate and adjust solutions to improve the city's investment and business environment," Mr. Chau emphasized.
Perhaps this is the crucial turning point for Hai Phong to break through from third place in the 2023 PCI ranking and claim the top spot.
Looking deeper into the Top 30 localities in the 2024 PCI ranking, we can see the presence of 6 centrally-governed cities and many neighboring localities. This is partly due to the advantages of major economic centers and their surrounding areas, such as better infrastructure, access to skilled labor, proximity to large markets, etc.
However, PCI experts assert that these advantages do not automatically guarantee high scores for businesses in these localities. In fact, many localities located in regional economic centers, with significant advantages in attracting investment, and which consistently ranked high in the PCI rankings, have been absent from the Top 30 in recent years.
Even Hai Phong itself has consistently ranked in the lower half of the PCI rankings for many years, reaching as low as 50th in 2012, with significant fluctuations. The upward trend only began in 2014, reaching 34th out of 63 provinces, but it took five years, until the 2019 PCI ranking, for Hai Phong to officially be included in the Top 10.
Mr. Dau Anh Tuan, Deputy Secretary General of VCCI and Director of PCI, stated that Hai Phong's achievements were built on persistent efforts over many years, not only surpassing its own previous performance but also exceeding the expectations of the business community. The involvement of various departments and agencies with numerous concrete actions, along with the government's implementation capacity, was key to Hai Phong's rise to the top.
The race in new space developments
The impact of the 2024 PCI will not stop at the announcement ceremony or in the PCI analysis reports commonly seen in localities. This is the final year that the PCI includes all 63 provinces and cities, but it could also be the starting point of a new competition, with higher demands and expectations.
In Resolution No. 60-NQ/TW, dated April 12, 2025, the 13th Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam approved the proposed list of names for provinces, cities, and political-administrative centers of 34 provincial-level administrative units.
Looking at the PCI rankings of the 52 merged provincial-level administrative units, there are relatively large differences in scores among some provinces. This reflects the gap in governance quality between localities, but also foreshadows challenges in resolving these differences. This is crucial, in the short term, to ensure a smooth transition, but in the long term, it requires continued efforts to promote improvements in the investment and business environment and maintain economic stability and development in the future.
But that's not the only challenge. Mr. Le Tien Chau mentioned Hai Phong's development journey, which is on par with leading Asian cities; a modern international port city, leading the country in industrialization and modernization; and an international center for economics, education, training, science, and technology. He also mentioned the growth target of 12.5% for 2025, aiming for a growth target of 15-16% in the 2026-2030 period.
In particular, the new generation free trade zone, with its unique and superior mechanisms and policies established according to the "one declaration, one inspection, and one approval" model based on international standards, has been proposed by the City and is expected to be approved this year, along with the resolution replacing Resolution No. 35/2021/QH15 of the National Assembly on piloting some specific mechanisms and policies for the development of Hai Phong City... However, Hai Phong's new journey will go hand in hand with Hai Duong.
Looking at the broader picture, Vietnam is entering a new period of development, with ambitious goals such as 8% GDP growth by 2025 and double-digit growth in the following years. Local authorities are all taking responsibility for achieving double-digit growth, alongside the requirement to complete mergers.
In this context, improving the business environment is not only a necessary condition but also a core driving force for Vietnam to achieve its aspirations. This also means that maintaining and improving the quality of local-level economic governance is an urgent and decisive task. Certainly, the collection of good examples from the PCI will include many more models and initiatives stemming from the "listening and acting" efforts of local governments after mergers.
Source: https://baodautu.vn/pci-2024-thu-hang-cho-chat-luong-lang-nghe-va-hanh-dong-d281764.html
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