Prime Minister: Institutions should not be the reason for infrastructure development to be stuck

Along with the requirement of synchronous development of the socio-economic infrastructure system, Resolution 13 of the Central Executive Committee issued on January 16, 2012 requires focusing resources on 4 key areas, including focusing on developing transport infrastructure, power supply infrastructure, irrigation infrastructure and climate change response and large urban infrastructure.

Since 2012, the Government has issued an Action Program to implement this Resolution.

After listening to the report of the Ministry of Planning and Investment on the implementation of Resolution 13, opinions at the meeting said that after more than 5 years of implementation, infrastructure in Vietnam has developed strongly, especially transport infrastructure.

However, infrastructure development still has many shortcomings. Infrastructure connections are not suitable, some are redundant, some are lacking. The important reason is that the quality of planning is not good. Resource mobilization, especially external resources, is still very difficult. Therefore, in the coming time, it is necessary to have a comprehensive assessment of the current development of 11 socio-economic infrastructures and what measures are needed to achieve the set goals, focusing on institutions, planning work and plans. Special policies and mechanisms are needed to mobilize resources; review planning associated with economic restructuring.

Concluding the meeting, the Prime Minister agreed that infrastructure has developed, the country has many large infrastructure projects. However, there are still problems such as unsynchronized planning, the progress of some projects is still slow. Infrastructure is still a bottleneck for development such as traffic jams, hospital overload, etc.

The Prime Minister said that Resolution 13 of the Central Committee has been issued for more than 5 years. This is the time to review the implementation of the Resolution and report to the Politburo for comments.

According to the Prime Minister, the draft report needs to clearly state new perspectives on infrastructure development - an issue considered a bottleneck for development, emphasizing new mechanisms and institutions that we need to supplement, amend and renew, such as the proposal of the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the Law on Investment in the form of PPP (public-private partnership). Especially finding new resources to develop the country, not because of institutions and mechanisms that are a deadlock in Vietnam's infrastructure development, the Prime Minister said and pointed out a number of issues that need to be clarified, such as the issue of socialization of resources because "without socialization, where will the resources be for development?". Socialization is necessary, so that the State, investors and people all benefit.

Infrastructure for socio-economic development, but the ultimate goal is to improve people's lives, therefore, besides hard infrastructure, very important factors but cannot be ignored are infrastructure such as education, healthcare or cannot have electricity shortage...

Regarding forms of resource mobilization, the Prime Minister said that when the economic scale has increased to over 5 million billion VND, the public debt/GDP ratio has decreased to 61%, is there room to request a policy to continue finding suitable ODA sources for investment or other forms such as government bonds, construction bonds, international bonds... so that we have resources to develop infrastructure, move the country forward, and not let infrastructure fall behind, affecting the country's development.

The Prime Minister requested that, after consulting with ministries and branches, the Ministry of Planning and Investment take the lead in drafting a specific report to submit to the Government Party Committee for comments, before submitting to the Politburo. Accordingly, the report must be sharper and clearer in its viewpoints. The recommendations should not be general, but should be more in-depth, specific, comprehensive, concise, and have a specific list of tasks to be implemented.

From the Politburo's conclusion on this issue, the Prime Minister will make a decision or the Government will make a Resolution on continuing to implement Resolution 13. Next, a national conference will be held to implement the Politburo's conclusion, the Prime Minister's decision or the Government's decision on infrastructure development.

The Prime Minister emphasized the spirit of how Resolution 13 should continue to be implemented more strongly and synchronously, to create an infrastructure revolution, as a premise to remove bottlenecks and infrastructure bottlenecks for development.