In preparing for the 2nd round of Vietnam – EU FTA (EVFTA), the Ministry of Finance has conducted a public consultation from the business community on the plan to open goods market under this important agreement.

On January 13th, 2013, VCCI submitted a Recommendation on Vietnam’s first tariff offer in EVFTA to the Ministry of Finance. The Recommendation emphasized:

• It is necessary in the first offer to determine specific, reasonable and grounded criteria in order to choose the products/ product categories that need protecting at  a high/medium/ low level or that require a long/medium/short opening schedule…
• The protection criteria should be the most important and necessary ones, with which general interest of the whole economy, not the interest of some specific sectors, is taken into account
• Apart from economic criteria, there should also be such criteria as “environmental protection”, “protection of the human health” or “Vietnamese cultural appropriation” to prevent the important public interest from being harmed.

In addition, VCCI also proposed that, in the negotiation process, the Ministry of Finance and the Government negotiation delegation consult not only associations and large corporations in the related industries, but also all other businesses (which use the related materials or services) and VCCI (as the focal point of the business community consultation under Decision No. 06/2012/QD-TTg) to ensure the effectiveness of consultation and the representation of participants. 

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