PCI

While the formal private sector is certainly booming in Vietnam, success has remained concentrated in only a handful of provinces. Eleven of Vietnam’s 64 provinces account for over 60 percent of growth in the active private sector and over 70 percent of both private sector investment and revenue. Infrastructure and entrepreneurial culture apparently play some role in creating this disparity, yet in the presence of a strong one-party central government, local governments seem to have considerable room to shape the pace and pattern of development within their borders. The Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) is designed to assess and benchmark the performance of provincial governments in developing business-friendly regulatory environments for private sector development. Due to its widespread acceptance, the PCI has been increasingly used as a critical tool to provide sub-national governments with specific knowledge and technical support to implement concrete governance reforms while enabling the voice of the domestic private sector to enter policy debates at provincial and national level.
The fourth annual iteration of PCI represents the unfiltered voice of nearly 8,000 Vietnamese entrepreneurs and managers of small and medium enterprises across 64 provinces was released last December with many surprising findings. More details about the launch, PCI annual reports and data and provincial benchmarking can be found in www.pcivietnam.org.