[12 Jan 2014] - Economica Vietnam have completed the first phase of a three-phase project - “District Competitiveness Index Ranking” (2013-2020) in Lao Cai. The project is one among the efforts by the People’s Committee of Lao Cai to create an enabling business and investment environment. The project aims to design a tool to assess and rank the performance, capacity and willingness of the district governments to develop a business-friendly environment for local private enterprises.



Improving economic governance and business environment are important and sustainable incentives to attract resources for local economic development. Lao Cai is one of leading provinces in this area as perceived by local business community in annual Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) Reports by Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) and The U.S Agency for International Development’s Vietnam Competitiveness Initiative (USAID/VNCI). During the period 2006-2012, the province has been in the Top 10 best performing provinces, and in the Top 3 best performing provinces in terms of PCI score in the last 3 years (2009 – 2012).

Lao Cai has had different initiatives in order to maintain positive results achieved in previous years, and encourage efforts of the province’s authorities. Among them is the development of a tool to measure and assess the economic governance and business environment improvement at district level. As a result, the project “District Competitiveness Index Ranking of Lao Cai Province” has been approved by the Provincial People’s Committee and started to be implemented since July 2013.

The project is aimed to develop an index for measuring and assessing the economic governance and creating enabling business environment at district level. The project is composed of 3 phases: Phase 1 (2013): Develop the methodology and the index DCI, propose the tentative implementation schedule and activities for next phases; Phase 2 (2014-2015): Using the developed DCI in pilot survey in districts of Lao Cai Province to finalize the index and propose the ranking method options; Phase 3 (2016-2020): Conduct annual DCI survey and publicly announce the DCI results in the period 2016-2020.

With the support of Lao Cai People’s Committees, Department of Planning and Investment, Committee of DCI Development, and VCCI, Economica Vietnam have completed activities of the first phase of the project. The results of Phase 1 include (i) tools for District Competitiveness Index (DCI) surveys i.e. the methodology, the system of assessing criteria and sub-indexes of the Index and survey questions; (ii) report on the Index development, Scoring and Ranking methods; and (iii) tentative activities for Phase 2.

In the future, Economica Vietnam will continue to work closely with the province on this new initiative which is both highly challenging and innovative, thereby contributing further to the improvement of economic governance at provincial level. 

The District Competitiveness Index (DCI) in Lao Cai is a composite index used to measure and assess different areas in local economic governance and business environment improvement. It is composed of 8 sub-indexes: Entry cost, Land Access and Security of Tenure, Transparency, Informal Charges, Pro-activity of goverment leaders, Business Support Services, One-stop Shop, and Tax procedures. The results of sub-indexes will be the basis for calculating DCI overall scores.