On May 22^nd in Hanoi, the Journal of Economics and Forecast under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Planning and Investment organized a conference "Enterprises implementing social security and green growth".

The conference is a program responding to the implementation of Resolution No. 70 / NQ-CP dated November 1^st 2012 on the Government's Action Program to implement Resolution No. 15-NQ / TW dated June 1^st 2012 of The Central Committee of the Communist Party XI: "Some issues of social policy in the period of 2012-2020."

Assoc. Prof; Ph.D. Le Xuan Dinh, editorial director of the Journal of Economics and Forecast, emphasized that despite being a poor and retarded country in many aspects, Vietnam has committed to achieving the millennium goals. “Government leaders have repeatedly asserted to not sacrifice the people’s life quality for short-term rapid growth purpose.

Mr. Le Xuan Dinh stated that implementing social security is not only the help, kindness and charity of the enterprises for disadvantaged members in the society but it must come from the need to survive and develop of the enterprises and regulated by the law of the State.

According to Mr. Dinh, taking social responsibility will bring benefits not only to enterprises themselves, but also to the nation.

Specifically, at the enterprise level, when participating in the implementation of regulations on social responsibility, the enterprises will enhance their image and brand, create the trust of society and consumers for themselves and their products.

In the context of international integration, environmental commitment is an integral part. Thus, enterprises taking social responsibility is the opportunity for their products to meet international standards, to participate more deeply in the global supplying chain.

A significant benefit for enterprises to reduce costs and improve production efficiency in long term is investment, technology transferring, environmental friendly production process. At the same time, this helps enterprises improving their competitive positions in the market, especially in the trend of more and more countries promoting and implementing national programs on green procurement and consumption as today.

At the national level, Mr. Le Xuan Dinh said that the nation's greatest benefits through mobilizing enterprises to promote social responsibility and green growth are contributing to the improvement of their advantages, enhancing the country's general strength.

In addition, in the context of limited budget revenues, the active participation of enterprises in investment projects, environmental protection solutions will promote the policy of socialization in green increasing, reduce the pressure on the State budget for environmental protection.

With this viewpoint, Nguyen Van Hoi, Director of the Social Protection Department (Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs) affirmed: "Enterprises themselves should consider implementing social security as the lever, motivation for their development ".

In fact, according to survey data recently conducted by the Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs at 50 enterprises in the textiles and shoe leather sector, thanks to the implementation of "corporate social responsibility", the income from these enterprises increased by 25%, labor productivity increased from 34.2 to 35.8 million VND / worker per year, the proportion of exports increased from 94% to 97%.

However, experts said that Vietnamese enterprises’ commitment to green production and lifestyle promotion activities is still limited. Policies promoting green growth and social responsibility of businesses still need more time to get into life, or be transformed to a new level.

"This is due to the fact that more than 97% of enterprises are small and super small, lack awareness of social tasks, sustainable growth. In addition, the capital is small, human resources for researching and developing are lack in quantity, weak in quality and technology, are not capable of conducting research or deployment or technology innovation." explained Mr. Nguyen Van Hoi.

Therefore, according to Assoc. Prof; Ph.D. Le Xuan Dinh, the first thing to do is raising awareness among business community about green growth and social security.

"Being competitive with the simple price, the difference of products is out of date now, the enterprises have to create sustainable competition, consider the synchronization of factors when planning competitive strategy such as: medical health, society, environment, natural resources saving, biodiversity maintaining.”

According to Ph.D. Vo Tri Thanh, the director of the Institute for Strategic Brand and Competition, said that enterprises should concern implementing solutions for social security and green growth is “a new playground”, searching for new business opportunities with profits as well as creating community and social spread, not only the “responsibility”.

Besides, Mr. Thanh said: "Although the number of avoiding enterprises is not small, good companies are still a lot. Let’s encourage correct ways and good models, praise, congratulate the winners instead of giving bad examples only."

By VGP