VietNamNet Bridge – It always happens that the annual budget
reserved for scientific research projects has not been used up over the last
many years.
“The Ministry of Finance (MOF)
feels uneasy when science projects do not use up the money allocated to them,”
said Nguyen Truong Giang, a senior official of the ministry.
Giang said that despite the
scanty state budget, the science and technology sector always has the budget
equal to 0.5-0.6 percent of GDP for development. In 2006-2011, the sector,
considered the most important one in the national economy, was allocated the
budget of 57,032 billion dong.
Nguyen Thi Minh, Deputy Minister
of Finance, said the specialized sector can enjoy a very flexible finance
policy with flexible mechanisms applied to ensure that money can be addressed
to the most important and urgent projects.
“The financial mechanism applied
for the sector has always been very open,” Minh said.
“Money always comes quickly,
while scientific researchers do not have to wait. They are also not required to
list all the expenditure items and show all necessary bills in order to get
money from the treasury,” she added.
However, scientific research
projects still cannot enjoy the preferential flexible policy, and do not use up
all the money allocated to them. By the end of 2011, MOF had noted that 870
billion dong had not been disbursed because it was impossible to define the
accurate duties, expenditure items and the scientific research works.
For the same reason, the
disbursement for science and technology development by October 2012 has also
been going slowly with 260 billion dong undisbursed. Of this amount, 215
billion dong was planned to go scientific units and the remaining 45 billion
dong was reserved for the Ministry of Science and Technology.
“MOF has sent a dispatch to the
Ministry of Science and Technology and relevant ministries and branches, urging
them to implement the approved scientific research works, so that the State
Treasury can make disbursement on schedule,” Giang said.
“If we don’t receive replies from
the ministries in some more days, we will have to… send more dispatches to
remind them,” he added.
“Unlike the other sectors, in science
and technology, money always waits to be disbursed to implement science
projects, not science projects wait for money to be implemented,” Giang
repeated the words spoken by Deputy Minister of Finance Nguyen Thi Minh at the
National Assembly’s session in late September.
MOF has not only expressed its
concern that the science and technology sector cannot use the capital resource
in the most effective way, but also pointed out that it’s very difficult to
attract the investment from the society on science projects.
In other countries, when the
state spends every 10 dong on science and technology development, it would
attract 30 dong worth of investment from the society. Meanwhile, the ratio is
10 dong and 3 dong in Vietnam.
Therefore, Giang has urged to
apply the policies which allow to diversify the capital resources for science
and technology development.
Currently, the state encourages
enterprises to pay more attention to the technology development by allowing
enterprises to put 10 percent of pretax profit for their science and technology
development fund.
However, as Minister of Science
and Technology Nguyen Quan said, most enterprises have not set up such funds
yet. Some of the enterprises said they do not know how they should use the
money. Others said their revenue is modest-- just 200-300 million dong a year,
which is not big enough to feed the funds.
Dat Viet
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