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Happy New Year
Dear partners, friends and colleagues,
All of us at CUTS Hanoi Resource Centre are wishing you a
Happy New Year 2014! May the New Year bring you good health, happiness
and success in all your future endeavours!
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We are happy to share with you that the year 2013 has been
a success for us given our continuous efforts to strengthen existing
programmatic areas and expand into new ones have been paid off. While our
research into competition distortions and consumer protection issues in
Vietnam and dissemination of the findings fostered a general understanding
about these issues, we kept providing a wide range of stakeholders access
to data and information on unfair trade practices. In addition to that,
we helped to build national and regional knowledge on international
standard setting processes and climate change issues. The work can be
best demonstrated by our top 5 achievements in 2013 that we would like to
share with you now! We trust that your fruitful collaboration and
partnership would be of great help to ensure our continued success in 2014!
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COMPETITION
& CONSUMER PROTECTION
We raise public awareness in Vietnam
Our Vietnam Competition and Consumer Protection Dossier,
produced on a quarterly basis, is aimed at raising awareness and giving
insights about different aspects of competition and consumer protection
issues which now captures increasing attention from the public nation-wide.
A Column on Standards & Quality is now included every
quarter to update news on standard and quality related issues not only in
Vietnam, but also in the regional and international context. The Column
aims at communicating with the audience about standardization and quality
assurance initiatives around the globe that are happening with or without
their participation.
These publications have been distributed to a database which
comprises more than 500 relevant stakeholders, experts, donor agencies, and
partners working in various programmatic areas. We have received good
feedbacks from the audience, demonstrated by favourable comments and an
increasing number of new subscribers. Following the success, in the future,
all publications from CUTS Hanoi Resource Centre would be circulated
amongst this database, as well as important new items to be shared.
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TRADE & STANDARDIZATION
We promote trade through participating in a globally-relevant
standardization process
As a partner organisation specifically for the Southeast
Asia region in the Sida-supported “Trade Promotion through Standardization
in the South and Southeast Asia (SESA) regions” programme, CUTS Hanoi
Resource Centre helped to link the main themes of the programme, which are
standards and standardization, to the broader policy levels of trade
promotion, consumer protection, regional integration and sustainable
development, by engaging stakeholders – which are our core competencies.
In addition to representing in various workshops, seminars
and conferences organized nationally and internationally, we successfully
organized an august meeting during 17-18 December 2013 in Vientiane, Lao
PDR which gathered representatives from various national standard bodies,
ministries of industry and commerce, chambers of industry and commerce as
well as several export-oriented enterprises from Laos, Thailand, Indonesia,
Myanmar, Cambodia, Singapore and Vietnam to share and exchange their view
on the significance of standards and the standardization process as well as
impacts on regional integration and trade promotion, and also to collect
feedbacks on national, sub-regional, regional and international
institutions for more inclusive and effective standardization process at
all levels.
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CLIMATE
CHANGE
We care about climate change
Climate change is increasingly recognized as a global crisis
which affects every country, people in different locations, social classes,
genders and ages. Being aware of the cause and effects of climate change,
we would like to contribute our small actions in order to help addressing
this problem.
We developed a simple guidebook on Carbon Footprint of
Products (CFP) based on a new ISO Technical Specification entitled “Greenhouse
gases – Carbon footprint of products – Requirements and guidelines for
quantification and communication” (ISO/TS 14067:2013) with a view to
helping relevant stakeholders in Vietnam to get an initial understanding
about CFP and be able to support the replication of such a process in
Vietnam. The reasoning is simple: To effectively reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, one must first identify their sources, and the carbon footprint
concept highlights the contribution of individual products to the
greenhouse effect.
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MEGA-REGIONAL
TRADE DEALS
Let us talk about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement
The TPP Agreement, which is currently being negotiated by
Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand,
Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam, is well known for being
the most extensive so far (i.e. going beyond ‘conventional’ trade issues to
include behind-the-border trade-related matters) yet most secretive and
least transparent trade negotiations in history. It is also reportedly
facing huge protests from civil society around the world for having several
anti-development, anti-consumer, anti-developing countries provisions on
investment, intellectual property rights, etc.
CUTS Hanoi Resource Centre produced two papers related to this
mega trade deal, one on its yet-to-be-disclosed chapter on competition
policy and the implications on consumers, and the other about its principle
of competitive neutrality and how that would affect State-owned Enterprises
(SOEs) in developing-economy parties to the negotiations. Yet although, we
maintained our neutral, non-partisan and objective ground.
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UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES
We provide an information pool and discussion forum on Unfair Trade
Practices (UTPs)
Within the framework of our IDRC-supported project entitled
“Study on Unfair Trade Practices in ASEAN”, we developed and maintained a
Project Webpage at http://utp.cuts-hrc.org as a hub of
electronic data and information on UTPs in ASEAN member countries with free
access for all users. All the project outputs, including research reports,
policy briefs, news items, presentations made during project events are
freely available on this web-page till date.
Besides, an e-Discussion Forum facilitated by us has
continuously helped to foster networking of relevant stakeholders,
researchers, and activists involved during the field research process, or
those working on the issues in general.
The ultimate objective is to generate and promote
substantive discussions/dialogues in the ASEAN and beyond on the relevant
issues, which is expected to lead and contribute to the improvement of the
relevant legal and institutional frameworks in ASEAN countries that seek to
sustain a fair business environment therein and ensure equitable market
outcomes in the long run. In 2014 and further, we would deepen our works in
this area by looking more specifically at issues that affect Micro-, Small-
and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) to help them get a fair and better
deal in the marketplace against the big guys.
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CUTS International - Hanoi Resource Centre
No. 112 Kham Thien Str, Dong Da District, Hanoi, Vietnam
Tel: +84 (0) 462 763 600
Fax: +84 (0) 462 763 606
Email: hanoi@cuts.org
Website: www.cuts-hrc.org
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