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Tougher management on public land and property needed

VGP – Efficient management of public land and property may generate between US $4-5 billion for the State budget, according to the Ministry of Finance's calculation.

March 29, 2012 8:25 AM GMT+7

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The wasteful use of land is popular across the country, especially in big cities but local authorities can not take back these wasted land areas for more profitable purposes as current regulations state that land owned by state-owned enterprises is subject to central agencies’ management.

According to the State Property Management Bureau, State enterprises alone are now managing a total land area of 155 million square meters. Although many of them do not have enough capital to restructure their business, they refuse to sell or put their land into good use.

Over the past time, many localities have dispatched delegations to grass-roots levels to review land use, detecting that lots of land lots are not in use or leased by other organizations without paying taxes.

To generate cash from public land and property use for socio-economic development, the Government approved long-term land planning schemes proposed by localities.

Accordingly, localities are allowed to take back land lots that are used inefficiently and wastefully by central agencies to build new social welfare works or facilities of beneficial purposes.

In its recent move, the Ministry of Finance is now finalizing a project on exploiting financial resources from public land and property use for socio-economic development in a bid to have tougher measures against the wasteful use of public land and property.

By Hải Minh