Vietnam has enjoyed significant economic success since the implementation of its "doi moi" reforms, including rapid growth in GDP, exports and foreign and domestic investment, and a shedding of poorly-performing state-owned enterprises. Despite this, however, the economic situation for many ordinary people in Vietnam is fragile, with income only just above the poverty line, and high unemployment, especially among the young. In addition, inflation is high, and the state-owned sector is still large, much of it still performing badly. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the current economic situation in Vietnam. It outlines the state of the economy, paying special attention to employment, discusses government policies including on trade and integration with the global economy, and concludes by assessing the key challenges facing Vietnam’s economy going forward.
Between 1993 and 1997, Vietnam was one of the fastest growing economies, with GDP increasing almost 9 percent a year and the industrial sector expanding roughly 13 percent a year. This paper addresses the impact of that economic growth on employment.
Education has played an important role in making Vietnam a development success story over the last twenty years. In the 1990s and early 2000s Vietnam experienced rapid economic growth and poverty reduction in the wake of a rapid shift of employment from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity nonfarm jobs. Vietnam's committed effort to promote access to quality primary education for all has enabled this transformation and contributed to the country's reputation for having a young, well-educated work force. Skilling Up Vietnam argues that to continue its success story, Vietnam needs to renew its focus on education: not just expanding attainment, but equipping its workforce with the right skills will be needed to foster to Vietnam's continued economic modernization in the coming decade and more. Despite the evidence of impressive basic literacy and numeracy achievements among Vietnamese youth and workers presented in this book, many Vietnamese businesses report that a significant obstacle to their activity is the shortage of workers with adequate skills. Drawing on a survey of employers in urban areas, the book finds that, in addition to job-specific skills, Vietnamese employers value cognitive skills, such as problem solving and critical thinking, and behavioral skills, such as team work and communication. Reorienting Vietnam's education system toward teaching these types of skills will help prepare Vietnamese workers for a modern market economy. Skilling Up Vietnam proposes a three-step holistic skills strategy that looks at today's workforce as much as the future workforce. Vietnam's skills development efforts should focus on promoting school readiness through early childhood development, ensuring a strong cognitive and behavioral foundation in general education, and building job-relevant technical skills through a more connected system among employers, students and universities, and vocational schools.
Vietnam's economy has been fundamentally changed by the policy reforms implemented in the 1980s to provide an environment that is more conducive for economic growth and social stabilization. The policy reforms have had a tremendous impact on economic activities and on all aspects of social life. The economy is presently moving from a centrally planned system largely based on public ownership to a market-oriented and mixed economy. Social structures and values have changed, and legal, institutional, and administrative systems are gradually changing as well. The reform process gives rise to exciting challenges and opportunities for development. Based largely on Vietnamese sources of data and information, this book presents an analysis of the main features of economic policy reforms in Vietnam, their socioeconomic impact, and several major theoretical and practical problems Vietnam faces on its path to development.
Education has played an important role in making Vietnam a development success story over the last twenty years. In the 1990s and early 2000s Vietnam experienced rapid economic growth and poverty reduction in the wake of a rapid shift of employment from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity nonfarm jobs. Vietnam's committed effort to promote access to quality primary education for all has enabled this transformation and contributed to the country's reputation for having a young, well-educated work force. Skilling Up Vietnam argues that to continue its success story, Vietnam needs to renew its focus on education: not just expanding attainment, but equipping its workforce with the right skills will be needed to foster to Vietnam's continued economic modernization in the coming decade and more. Despite the evidence of impressive basic literacy and numeracy achievements among Vietnamese youth and workers presented in this book, many Vietnamese businesses report that a significant obstacle to their activity is the shortage of workers with adequate skills. Drawing on a survey of employers in urban areas, the book finds that, in addition to job-specific skills, Vietnamese employers value cognitive skills, such as problem solving and critical thinking, and behavioral skills, such as team work and communication. Reorienting Vietnam's education system toward teaching these types of skills will help prepare Vietnamese workers for a modern market economy. Skilling Up Vietnam proposes a three-step holistic skills strategy that looks at today's workforce as much as the future workforce. Vietnam's skills development efforts should focus on promoting school readiness through early childhood development, ensuring a strong cognitive and behavioral foundation in general education, and building job-relevant technical skills through a more connected system among employers, students and universities, and vocational schools.
The transformation of the Vietnamese economy from socialist planning to a market economy has led to Vietnam having one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world; and to also to Vietnam engaging much more with the international economy, joining the World Trade Organisation in 2006. This book fills a significant gap by surveying the economic reforms in Vietnam, where most studies have concentrated on other ‘young tiger’ economies. In particular it discusses the transformation of employment relations which have been a key part of the reforms and a necessary pre-condition to WTO membership. It examines the nature of employment reforms, analyses the motivation behind new policy initiatives and examines the detail of reforms in a range of business enterprises, reporting on extensive original research. Throughout it shows how several key forces have interacted – globalisation, government political interests, national cultural norms, market, managerial ideology and the special characteristics of particular firms – to produce a particular Vietnamese brand of post-communist market economy. Overall, this book illuminates the how employment relation practices are formed in transitional economies, and more broadly the economic and political transformation of socialist economies in the context of the global market.
Based on a wide array of quantitative and qualitative techniques, Light Manufacturing in Vietnam identifies key constraints on manufacturing enterprises in Vietnam and evaluates differences in firm performance across China and Vietnam.
With the adoption of new market-oriented policies, Vietnam has transformed itself from one of the world's poorest countries during the 1980s, into an economy with one of the highest growth rates during the 1990s. Using macroeconomic and household survey data, this publication examines a range of issues including: the causes of Vietnam's economic growth and future prospects; the impact on household welfare and poverty levels, school enrolment, child health and other socioeconomic outcomes; and the nature of poverty in Vietnam and the effectiveness of government policies for poverty reduction, drawing lessons for Vietnam and for other low-income developing countries.
During the past decade, Vietnam has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but employment growth has been much slower. The large gap between GDP and employment growth implies real labor productivity growth, so greater per capita income. However, this enlarging gap, together with emerging unemployment and underemployment problems, also indicates limited benefits to employment from output expansion, an issue of concern to Vietnamese policymakers. This dissertation research addresses the relationship between GDP growth and employment growth. The central question is why labor demand in Vietnam grows so much more slowly than GDP. Three fundamental causes proposed to explain slow employment growth are: 1) structural transformation; 2) labor-saving technological progress; and 3) institutional biases due to minimum wage and state investment policies. A decomposition of labor demand growth shows that structural transformation and state investment bias can at most explain 40% of the difference between GDP and employment growth, while the remaining 60% is due to biased technological change and minimum wage bias. Further analysis breaks apart these effects due to changing sectoral output structures and declining labor-output ratios, respectively. Productivity growth prevailed in Vietnam over the past decade, but we need to allow for biased technological change to find it. Biased technological progress is more important than all other factors in affecting labor demand growth. For the entire economy, the Leontief production function best fits the data, and estimates suggest a 5% increase in labor productivity and a 1% increase in capital productivity per year during 2000-2009. The traditional agricultural sector also experienced 3% annual growth of labor productivity accelerating the structural transformation process. State investment bias has slowed labor demand growth by 0.51% per year. Privatization is beneficial to labor demand growth as a result of higher labor intensity in non-state firms relative to state owned enterprises, and robust growth of the domestic private sector. Minimum wage bias is not an important contributing factor, due to low elasticities of factor substitution and weak links between minimum and market wages. Tighter regulation of the minimum wage policy will only strongly affect labor demand in the formal agricultural and manufacturing sectors. The problem of stagnant employment is shared in other Asian countries. Labor demand growth decomposition for China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam for 1986-2008 shows that biased technological progress was responsible for more than 70% of slow employment growth, while structural transformation can only explain up to 30% of the gap between GDP and employment growth. Capital accumulation has been the dominant factor driving Asian economic growth at the early stages of the development, but as development proceeds, technological progress, especially the labor saving type, eventually plays a more important role.
As a result of the economic reform programme in Vietnam the private sector has assumed a key role as engine of economic growth and source of employment and income generation. Yet, information on this sector has been woefully inadequate. The present study provides a first comprehensive investigation of the private non-farm sector in post-reform Vietnam, based on a large field survey of rural and urban non-state enterprises in both the south and the north in 1991. The economic and operational characteristics of these enterprises, their development track and growth constraints, linkages with othe.
