HCMC accelerating public investment

Severely affected by the Covid-19 epidemic in 2021, Ho Chi Minh City had applied a social distancing mandate for half a year, leading to difficulties in labor resources, supply of materials, and an increase in unexpected costs; as a result, the results of disbursement of public investment were not as good as expected. Therefore, the city is accelerating public investment this year.
HCMC accelerating public investment ảnh 1 Illustrative photo
Director of Ho Chi Minh City Department of Planning and Investment Le Thi Huynh Mai had a talk about solutions to promote disbursement of public investment capital in the near future.
The amount of disbursement  in 2021 only reached VND 16,589 billion (US$733,342,754) of the total allocated capital of VND32,262 billion, equivalent to 51.4 percent.
Compared to prior years, disbursement results in 2021 are low in the context of unprecedented epidemics, investors and state management agencies must allocate human resources to support epidemic prevention and control, inadequacies in public investment, land, construction, bidding procedures, regulations on criteria. Some regulations are not specific; thus, it takes time for competent authorities to explain.
The city will have three major solutions in 2022. Specifically, the city will speed up the implementation of compensation, support and resettlement for projects with land acquisition, to hand over project sites to investors for implementation.
Secondly, the city will accelerate the project implementation. In which, the governing bodies must strengthen supervision of investors to organize the implementation of ongoing projects as well as closely follow the progress and urge the contractors to accelerate the implementation progress to complete the acceptance, payment, and disbursement of capital to the contractors. Additionally, the city promptly helps remove difficulties in each stage of implementation to ensure the project's progress.
Thirdly, relevant agencies are to strengthen inspection and supervision, focus on monitoring the disbursement situation. Heads of managing units must keep an eye on the disbursement of public investment capital of their units; they must take full responsibility in front of their superiors.
Based on the progress of disbursement of the public investment plan in 2022 of the investors, the Department of Planning and Investment advised the People's Committee of Ho Chi Minh City to transfer capital from low-disbursed projects to projects with higher potential disbursement during the year.
The city has focused solutions to find investment resources and promote socialization. The southern metropolis will strengthen the ability to balance investment capital of the city budget, such as submission of the Project on Adjusting the budget retention rate for Ho Chi Minh City in the period of 2022-2025, with a vision to 2026-2030.
Last but not least, it will review and assess the state of budget revenue and expenditure, the city's ability to balance capital sources to issue local government bonds to create more capital for investment.
The city will mobilize investment resources from the city's public land fund and public assets while reviewing the public land fund and strengthening land management to ensure the right use of land in accordance with the planning. If there is any unused public lands, the city will develop an auction plan for the land lots.
The city will invite investors to mobilize social resources to participate in investment to make the most of investment resources from society, reduce pressure on investment in an effort to restructure public investment and improve the efficiency of public investment capital.
Furthermore, it will mobilize investment resources through the equitization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
In the coming time, the city will continue to implement solutions to mobilize investment resources through the equitization of state-owned enterprises. Specifically, it is continuing to propose to the Prime Minister to soon issue a decision approving the list of enterprises to be equitized from 2021 to 2025 in addition to the formulation of a plan to arrange and equitize state-owned enterprises with 100 percent state capital in the city according to the Prime Minister's Decision No. 22/2021.
In addition, the city will also continue to propose to the Prime Minister to soon approve two projects to restructure state-owned enterprises in the city for the period 2021-2025 and to restructure SOEs for the 2021-2025 period to serve as a basis for the arrangement and equitization of SOEs.

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