At the ongoing 4th Ordinary Session of the National Assembly, people representatives have urged the government to ensure the country’s economy grows by at least 4.5% and per capita incomes and GNI are increased.
Members of the National Assembly have noted that it is obvious that several sectors and provinces have potentials and are likely to collect enough revenues that can ensure they have budget sufficiency and exceed revenue collection plans.
Giving an interview to the media on Wednesday, Vice President of the National Assembly Sommad Pholsena said that the government has been urged to make efforts in mobilizing financial resources through promoting domestic and foreign investment, ODAs, stock market development, and making use of existing funds to achieve targets of its National Socio-economic Development Plan.
It has been asked to attach greater attention to promoting domestic and foreign investment in special and specific economic zones by taking into account lessons learned in neighbouring countries and other friendly countries.
The National Assembly has urged strict management of state investment projects, and proper consideration of measures that can help better tap domestic potentials including the Laos-China railway, dry ports, special economic zones and other economic sectors to promote the country’s connectivity.
People’s representatives have called on the government to promote domestic production to reduce imports, help local businesses access carbon funds, accelerate devising land use strategic plans of each sector and province, and pay adequate attention to basic infrastructure development in the education sector.
They have called on the government to reallocate civil servant quotas, devise an incentive policy for volunteer teachers and volunteer health workers, especially those working in remote areas, and provide educational equipment and textbooks to all schools across the country, address school dropout problems and encourage secondary school graduates to pursue education at tertiary, vocational and university levels as well as address malnutrition problems among children, and improve the health insurance system.
NA has also urged the government to continue to reform state enterprises, attach attention to evaluating and implementing priority projects of rural development and poverty reduction in target districts, promote rule of law and address social shortcomings in a strict, transparent and professional fashion, take decisive actions against the budget units that violate planning and investment regulations, and attach importance to the implementation of the three-build directive along with the patriotism and development movement and urge local administrations to be more active in developing their localities.
The National Assembly has also asked the government to pay attention to implementing the national agenda on addressing economic and financial difficulties as a priority of the National Socio-economic Development Plan and make sure a significant progress is made to ensure the country will not fall into an economic recession, and come up with measures that can mobilize funding in a certain, stable, sustainable manner especially from domestic partners to cut public debts to less than 64.5% of GDP and foreign debts to less than 55.4% of GDP.
NA has also noted that it is necessary for the government to strengthen revenue collection in the tourism sector and make the best use of Laos-China railway, establish local production and goods zones in each province and ensure their processing is diverse and low interest loans are accessible to reduce costs of local producers and increase the competitiveness of local products against imported ones.
The government has been asked to attach attention to improving land tax collection by using an integrated banking system, increasing effectiveness of state spending management, and evaluating the provision of loans to small and medium enterprises, young entrepreuners and producers including the 300-billion-kip package for SMEs and the Bank of the Lao PDR’s 1.8 trillion kip loan to relieve Covid-19 impacts.
Source: Lao News Agency