This book presents an overview of political economic change in Vietnam during a period of significant social and economic change and an era of international turbulence. It combines various political economic perspectives to offer an integrated and comprehensive review of Vietnam’s recent development, discussing topics such as public administrative reform, labour markets and special economic zones, environmental management and other important contemporary issues. This concise and highly readable book includes a considerable amount of research, and as such provides valuable insights for scholars and researchers interested in political economic change and in Vietnam.
This book presents an overview of political economic change in Vietnam during a period of significant social and economic change and an era of international turbulence. It combines various political economic perspectives to offer an integrated and comprehensive review of Vietnam's recent development, discussing topics such as public administrative reform, labour markets and special economic zones, environmental management and other important contemporary issues. This concise and highly readable book includes a considerable amount of research, and as such provides valuable insights for scholars and researchers interested in political economic change and in Vietnam.
This book presents an overview of political economic change in Vietnam during a period of significant social and economic change and an era of international turbulence. It combines various political economic perspectives to offer an integrated and comprehensive review of Vietnam’s recent development, discussing topics such as public administrative reform, labour markets and special economic zones, environmental management and other important contemporary issues. This concise and highly readable book includes a considerable amount of research, and as such provides valuable insights for scholars and researchers interested in political economic change and in Vietnam.
Rent seeking continues to be a topic of much discussion and debate within the political economy. This new study challenges previous assumptions and sets out a new analysis of the dynamics of rent and rent seeking in development, using Vietnam as a case study. This book provides an alternative approach to the study of economic development and illuminates new perspectives in a contemporary context. It argues that not only has there been an incomplete understanding of Vietnam’s industrial development over the last three decades, but that neoclassical economics do not adequately address many of the issues endangering Vietnam’s development. A significant observation of the Vietnamese experience is the analytical view that rents can be developmental and growth enhancing if the configuration of rent management incentivizes industrial upgrade and conditions firm performance. Underlining the need to reexamine how economic actors and the state collaborate through formal and informal institutions, this study fills a gap in the scholarship of the political economy of rent and rent seeking and how rents might be used for developmental purposes.
Since the doi moi reforms in 1986, Vietnam has experienced a dramatic socioeconomic transformation. Lim examines the role of the state and its interaction with market forces in bringing this change about. Taking the motorcycle and banking industries as case studies, this book explores the dynamics between the state and transnational corporations in shaping the manufacturing and service sectors, respectively. Vietnam, as one of Southeast Asia’s quintessential latecomer economies with little prior experience of dealing with transnational corporations, has nevertheless been quite successful in maintaining some control over the impact of foreign direct investment. Yet, the learning outcomes remain highly uneven. In addition, Lim argues that Vietnamese advancement in both industries mirrors only partially the more generalized patterns of state-led development in East Asia’s earlier batch of latecomer economies. Vietnam’s case thus presents practical lessons on how to succeed in crafting and utilizing policy instruments to achieve domestic economic and technological upgrading. This book will be of great interest to scholars of political economy and industrial policy in East Asia, as well as to scholars and policy professionals analyzing approaches to development strategy more broadly.
This book, first published in 1999, analyses the history and major economic features of the Vietnamese reform process. The attempt to establish a post-reunification centrally planned economic system, a collectivised agriculture and a capital-intensive and inward-oriented industrial sector had largely failed, provoking the development of a parallel economy which turned out to be the nucleus of an emerging private sector. The book focuses on the reform of enterprises and the financial sector and gives an overall picture of the reform efforts in the areas of rural development, the social sectors and environmental policy, and assesses the further changes and reforms needed in the country.
This book explores the way in which the state has become commercialised under reform as party and government officials have gone into business and considers the impact that this has had on politics within Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The book charts the way in which power has been decentralised to the lower levels of the party-state but argues that the central state retains significant power. These issues are explored through a variety of case studies including the implementation of different reform policies, struggles over political and business activity, and the prosecution of two major corruption cases. Particular emphasis is placed on piecing together the myriad of informal practices which dominate business and political life in Vietnam.
This book is based upon extensive and repeated fieldwork, close observation and familiarity with institutional detail. It traces Vietnam’s early attempts to create in State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) a basis for a military-industrial complex, and the ways in which these attempts failed, which explains the nature of state commercialism through the 1980s and into recent years. Since the 1990 breakout to a market economy, Vietnam has shown outstanding development success, with rapid GDP growth, macroeconomic stability, swift poverty reduction, maintenance of social spending and extensive globalisation. Her SOEs have played a major role, not only in showing that performance gains in 1989-91 could compensate for loss of the large Soviet bloc aid program, but also as major players in the rapid economic change of the 1990s, during which the officially reported state share of GDP remained high. By the middle of the 2000s, however, a rising private sector was, in harness with a large presence of foreign companies, sharply increasing pressures upon SOEs. Against this background, the book concludes with an assessment of the extent to which Vietnam’s commercialised SOEs are now no longer seen as an effective compromise, but acting as a major hindrance to Vietnam’s development. Historical analysis of the process by which Vietnam’s SOEs shifted from central-planning to operation in an increasingly globalised market economy Draws upon regular and repeated fieldwork going back to the late 1970s Uses a wide range of Vietnamese language and other sources
This clear and accessible text explores Vietnam's successful transition from neo-Stalinist central planning to a market economy—\"Vietnamese style.\" After describing the north Vietnamese system prior to 1975 and its colonial and precolonial antecedents, the authors uncover the mechanisms of that changeover. They contend that the Vietnamese transition was largely bottom-up in character and that it evolved over a long enough period for the country's political economy to adjust. This explains in part the rapid shift to a high-growth, externally oriented development path in the early 1990s, despite the loss of Soviet aid and the lack of significant Western substitutes until 1992-1993. Based upon extensive incountry experience, a wealth of primary materials, and wide comparative knowledge of development issues, the book challenges many preconceived notions, both about Vietnam and about the general nature of transition processes.
