In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Earlier today in Vietnam, The Asia Foundation and its local partners released one of the year’s most highly anticipated reports: the 2008 Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI). The PCI ranks the ability and willingness of provincial governments to develop business-friendly environments for private sector development. This marks the fourth in an annual series of Vietnam’s largest [...]

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On a recent afternoon in Hanoi, I found myself sitting in a crowded conference room sipping tea and munching snacks with a young team of researchers, sifting through stacks of completed surveys looking for small coding errors in the data. Anyone watching would have been hard pressed to imagine we were putting together one of [...]

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Which local governments govern best? That is the central question addressed by the Local Economic Governance report launched on Tuesday by KPPOD (Regional Autonomy Watch) and The Asia Foundation. The report ranks 243 districts across Indonesia on the quality of their local economic governance based on a survey of over 12,000 businesses in 15 provinces, [...]

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Since its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2006, Vietnam has continued to improve its regulatory environment for business. The 2007 Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) report, which measures economic governance for private sector development, was released last week. This survey – the third annual edition – is the largest and most comprehensive assessment ever [...]

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“Keep making your voice heard, keep informing us of your concerns, we need to hear from you,” Senator Ung Huot, Vice Chairman of the Senate Commission on Economy, urged representatives of provincial small business associations in a meeting at the Senate on September 7th in Phnom Penh. “Improving your business environment will take time,” he [...]

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