Mr Gia said:

In the past, there were 104 ministries and organs equivalent to ministries in the former Soviet Union. Each ministry took the management of one branch. No country in the world now organises the government apparatus in such a way. The Peoples’ Republic of China, for example, is a vast land, but there are few locations, and the number of Chinese ministries is just equal to Vietnam. Its national economy has been growing fast, but it does not have an agriculture ministry. Vietnam has the Ministry of Planning and Investment, of which I was once the minister, but it does not exist in other countries. China also does not have such a ministry.

The big problem now is overlapping among ministries, among organisations of the Communist parties, and among departments in a ministry.

Do you mean that there is no need to have one ministry for every branch?

Yes, I do. There are three things management organs have to do: First, lay down the policies for development; second, guide and organise the implementation of the policies; and third, supervise and examine the policies’ implementation. I don’t think that there is a development policy which is so small that it can be applied for one branch only. No need to set up a ministry and then spend money to feed the ministry just to make policies for a narrow branch. It is necessary to have common policies, especially in the current context. The policies should be based on interdisciplinary programming, so that they can bring benefit to all branches. It would be bad if the policies bring benefit to one branch, but harm another.

It seems that Vietnam is following the principle, under which ministries are set up to take management over every branch, for example, the Ministries of Construction, Transport or Fisheries?

It is necessary to separate the ministries’ function of state management and the function of business and production management, and this has been mentioned in the documents of the Communist Party and the State. If it can be done, it would be possible to streamline ministries. Let’s take the Ministry of Construction for example.

If we could remove the existing general corporations of constructions from the ministry, the volume of works the ministry must do would decline considerably. If so, a question is raised: is it necessary to have the Ministry of Construction? You may see that there exist construction companies belonging to the Ministry of Construction, Ministry of Transport, while other construction companies belong to the Ministry of Industry. As such, there are three organs managing construction companies, while there should be one. If we remove the companies the Ministry of Transport is managing from it, the only task of the ministry would be compiling policies on building roads, and a question would be raised whether the Ministry of Transport is a must, or the policies on building roads should be undertaken by the Ministry of Construction.

The management over construction works should be undertaken by a state organ, which must not deeply interfere and get involved in the business relating to construction as currently seen. It is necessary to set up one organ only, and therefore, several ministries should be merged into each other.

If following your arguments, can we say that there is overlapping in functions of the Ministries of Construction and Transport, Trade and Industry, Planning and Investment and Finance?

I was the Minister of Planning and Investment, and I once proposed to merge my ministry into other ones to set up the Ministry of Economy, which has a bigger function. I have heard many other opinions that I find reasonable, for example, a ministry of economy can take management over the state budget spending, while the Ministry of Finance would focus on the collection for the state budget only. I also agree with the opinion that there should not be two ministries, the Ministry of Industry responsible for production, and the Ministry of Trade, responsible for goods circulation. The two functions of production and circulation management should exist, but should be put under one ministry.

Do you think that there should be 26 ministries as currently, if considering the volume of works? How many ministries should be enough?

In the current situation, if considering the volume of works, there should be the adjustment on the number of ministries and names of ministries. I think that 22-23 ministries would be enough for now.

You should not think that it is necessary to maintain the Ministry of Fisheries, because the ministry can help export $3bil worth of seafood. Farmers and enterprises themselves, not the ministry, can export seafood. You may know that the turnovers from footwear and oil are also very big, and if following this way of thinking, should we set up a ministry of footwear and a ministry of oil?

We have mentioned the need for administrative reform and apparatus capacity reinforcement. Do you think that we will make a breakthrough when we cut out several ministries?

We have mentioned the need for administrative reform for 14 years already. This includes institution reform, staff reform, and public administration reform. But I think we should start with the procedures reform.

The 14-year administrative reform has not been successful. The taskforce on the implementation of the 1999 Law Enterprise once tried to remove the so called ‘sub-licences’ which were granted by ministries and put difficulties on enterprises. Some 200 licences were removed, but many other sub-licences were born newly. We cannot undertake procedures reform before undertaking the institution reform. We talk about the ‘one-door’ policy, but the door links to many other smaller doors.

Source: Tien phong