Regional Linkage: Not Addition

To overcome the economic space divided by administrative boundaries, to allocate and best use the resources of the State and economic sectors for investment, there needs to be a clear mechanism to avoid overlap in addition to increasing the effectiveness of regional management.

Politburo member, Head of the Central Economic Commission Vuong Dinh Hue speaks at the Workshop

This was the topic discussed at the workshop “Regional economy in the process of restructuring and transforming the growth model in Vietnam”, which took place on April 3 in Hanoi.

Many opinions at the workshop shared the same opinion that although certain results have been achieved in implementing policies, mechanisms and strategies for regional economic development, there are still many limitations.

Specifically, key economic zones have not really played a leading role, having a spillover effect to form intra-regional and inter-regional economic value chains.

Master plans and regional sectoral plans are not really effective tools in orienting, coordinating, allocating budget, attracting investment, managing socio-economic space, especially in performing the role of binding intra-regional linkages.

Director of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM) Nguyen Dinh Cung commented: Regional linkage is currently still mainly voluntary and spontaneous, doing it when you like it, and not doing it when you don't like it, or doing it perfunctorily.

This reality leads to the situation where many economic development plans of localities in the region overlap, causing waste of development resources on a large scale. It even creates unhealthy competition trends between localities such as lowering land prices, excessive incentives, etc.

Meanwhile, many urgent regional issues are emerging that cannot be effectively resolved by individual localities, such as climate change and salinity intrusion in the Mekong Delta; drought and water resource management in the Central Highlands; forest management and ecology in the northern mountainous region, etc.

Conference Scene

From the perspective of an international agency, Ms. Victoria Kwakwa, Country Director of the World Bank in Vietnam, said that research on regional development linkages is very important to promptly and effectively resolve issues beyond the scope of each locality. Localities need to coordinate more closely according to the win-win principle to optimize efficiency as well as resilience to risks.

Politburo member and Head of the Central Economic Commission Vuong Dinh Hue said that the most important goal for socio-economic development according to regional planning is to promote the comparative advantages of each locality, overcome the economic space divided by administrative boundaries, and make the best use of State resources and economic sectors for investment, especially in transportation and new rural areas.

Therefore, in addition to the achieved results, a new perspective is needed to overcome limitations, ensuring that the economic restructuring process and the transformation of the regional growth model are part of economic restructuring and the transformation of the national growth model.

For example, for key economic regions, it is possible to consider and deliberate on issuing policies to orient development towards a knowledge-based economy, developing industries with high technology content, creating high added value. From there, the linkage will promote the dynamism of industrial zones according to the new growth strategy, as a breakthrough area in economic development, capable of competing with economic centers in the ASEAN region, Asia and the world.

As for regions with difficult socio-economic conditions, there should be policies to attract investment into industries that exploit comparative advantages, are suitable to natural and social conditions, preserve ecology, and have comprehensive integrated policies specific to the region, ensuring that the above functions are compensated from other economic areas.

In addition, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between regional economic development, regional linkage and decentralization, to propose the completion of the institution of division of labor and decentralization between the Central and local levels, both ensuring the unified concentration of the economy and promoting the initiative and creativity of localities. In addition, it is necessary to study the establishment of a regional development fund to synchronously implement inter-provincial and inter-regional projects.

According to Chinhphu.vn