Global Trade Alert

 On 3 February 2016, the Vietnamese government published Decree 11/2016/ND-CP, loosening the regulation on work permits.
With the new provisions in place, the minimum amount of work experience required to be classified as a foreign expert was reduced from five to three years. Foreigners, working in the country for less than 90 days per year, will not require a work permit if they are classified as experts.
Furthermore, teachers as well as individuals working for state agencies will no longer require a work permit either.
The decree came into force on 1 April 2016.
The list of affected trading partners was compiled in the following way: according to the General Statistics Office of Viet Nam, in 2013 (latest figures), 1.266 million out of 7.572 million - roughly one in six - foreign visitors arrived in the country for business-related purposes. Given that the Office provides foreign visitors statistics by country only in total (without differentiating between tourism and business), it is assumed that the share of business-related visitors is the same for each nationality. As usually the threshold for a country to be included as an affected trading partner is set to 10'000, with this statistic (total foreign visitors by nationality in 2014) the benchmark was set roughly six time as high.