Sementara itu Vietnam didatangi modal:
---------
BBC NEWS
Vietnam prepares for boom times
By Peter Day
BBC News, Vietnam
Vietnam is expected to become a member of the World Trade Organisation
next week. The deal will help a country once regarded as a backwater
to catch up with its economically successful neighbours.
Out there in the Mekong Delta, at the bottom of long thin Vietnam,
Hien Van Le is very, very proud of his catfish.
Every day, seven days a week, he takes a boat across the river to look
at his fish, millions of them in great ponds he has had excavated
along the river bank.
In the rapidly dwindling light of a sultry evening, two workers on a
tiny boat struggle with sacks of feed, letting it cascade into the
fishpond.
The surface of the water erupts like a sudden rainfall as the catfish
surface to fight for food.
Hien Van Le is a returnee: a Vietnam-born plastic surgeon who
practised in Japan and Los Angeles for many years.
But in 2002 he came home, and here in the Mekong Delta with two local
partners he started this 500-acre fish farm which now supplies 50
million fish a year to the export market.
Vietnam now attracts more overseas investment than India does; it is
second only to China in the Asian economic growth league
Elsewhere in the Mekong Delta, they grow rice, in profusion. A nation
that had to import rice 20 years ago has now become the biggest rice
exporter in the world.
And it is not just food. Vietnam is exporting steel, and computer
parts and now, highly skilled outsourced services, the kind on which
India has built a huge new reputation. Vietnam is making waves.
The Mekong catfish farmers, with two harvests a year, have their less
productive American rivals worried enough for the US to impose
anti-dumping duties.
Foreign investment
This is all happening in a place cut off from the rest of the world
for much of the past three decades, after the end of what we call the
Vietnam War and the Vietnamese call the American War.
Vietnam still has a Communist government but, just as China did in the
late 1970s, so in the year 2000 the Vietnamese authorities unveiled
big reforms which legitimised private business and turned many
state-owned firms into shareholder-owned companies.
The impact has been as dramatic as the Chinese industrial revolution.
Foreign investment is pouring in.
Vietnam now attracts more overseas investment than India does; it is
second only to China in the Asian economic growth league, and 50% of
the Vietnam population is aged 35 or under. The trite way of putting
it is that when they stopped making war here, they made love.
The hordes of young people simply don't remember the war; they are
well-educated, and very ambitious.
Skills chain
The computer chip giant Intel this year announced it was investing
£600m in a new plant to test and mount chips flown in from abroad - an
investment by an international giant that opened the eyes of many
other companies to the attractions of the country as a base.
Intel's main man in Vietnam is Phu Than, a local who was helicoptered
out of the grounds of the American embassy on the day that Saigon fell
in 1975.
Though he vividly remembers the feeling of a new life beginning on
that chaotic morning, in the year 2000 he came back.
Communist or not, Intel's chairman admiringly remarked that the
experience was very similar to the welcome Intel received from the
authorities in Ireland, a place in which it has now enthusiastically
invested billions.
Another incomer is Atlas Industries, an outsourcing firm run by an
Englishman called Joe Woolf that uses cheap Vietnamese technicians to
make construction drawings and 3D computer simulations for architects
far away in Britain and Australia.
This is outsourcing driving up the skills chain. It is a far cry from
the call centre mentality. The youthfulness of the Vietnamese cities
is particularly apparent in the millions of mopeds now scooting round
Ho Chi Minh City, the current name for what used to be Saigon.
It still bears the mark of elegant French colonialism, but as I wove
past the Reconciliation Palace and the elegant municipal theatre in a
tooting ballet of motor scooters, darting and weaving like the feeding
catfish in the Delta, I had an ugly premonition.
Economists say that soon - maybe as soon as next year - the income of
Vietnam's city families will reach the size when they will start to
buy cars.
And if that happens, then the flow of the hordes of mopeds will be
replaced by logjams, and the human scale and amiability of this
low-rise city will be shoved aside by angry people in static tin boxes
and looming skyscrapers like the other cities of Asia.
The authorities have big plans for public transport, and as this is
still a centrally directed economy they may be able to get their way.
But cars have a habit of winning people's hearts and minds, in a way
that the American military never managed to do, back in the 1970s.
>From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 6 January, 2007
at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for
World Service transmission times.
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Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6234089.stm
Published: 2007/01/06 12:02:12 GMT
© BBC MMVII
--- In [email protected], "Ambon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
http://www.tempointeraktif.com/hg/ekbis/2007/01/12/brk,20070112-91157,uk.html
>
> BKPM: Investors are Leaving ?
> Friday, 12 January, 2007 | 15:28 WIB
>
>
>
> TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta: The Capital Investment Coordinating
Agency (BKPM) acknowledged that it is yet to recognize foreign
investors that left the Indonesian Special Economic Zones. "We
absolutely do not know anything about the investors who are leaving.
However, we will investigate this later," Main Secretary of BKPM
Yus'an told Tempo yesterday (01/11) in Jakarta.
>
> According to him, there is not yet any report regarding turning
one's back on an investor-especially on the specific zones-to the
government. "However, for clearer information, why do not ask the
Deputy of Investment Control, who is also the task force head. Task
force team is a team whose task is to receive any complaints from the
investors and it will try to solve them," said Yus'an.
>
> He has also affirmed that the incentive packages that the government
offered were already clear: for example, Governmental Regulation
Number 7/2007 on Exemption of Value-Added Tax for Strategic Products.
"Investors-to-be on the said sectors in the governmental regulation
will enjoy the facilities this January," he said.
>
> Industry Minister Fahmi Idris said that the government will watch
investors' interests inside and outside the special zones. It will be
aimed at preventing investors from getting out of Indonesia. In
addition, he said, his party will always heed the policies that
competitor countries issue. "Should Thailand and Malaysia issue
incentives, Indonesia will adopt them," he said.
>
> RR ARIYANI | MUHAMAD FASABENI
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
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