Vietnamese State Industry And The Political Economy Of Commercial Renaissance: Dragon's Tooth Or Curate's Egg?

Summary: 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 the present. 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. Key Features: 1.Historical analysis of the process by which Vietnam's SOEs shifted from central-planning to operation in an increasingly globalised market economy 2.Draws upon regular and repeated fieldwork going back to the late 1970s 3.Uses a wide range of Vietnamese language and other sources 4.Draws upon the author's extensive research into other aspects of Vietnamese development, as well as his theoretical work ontransition processes 5.Positions Vietnam's experience within key areas of academic interest The Author: Adam Fforde is a Principal Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Studies, University of Melbourne, and Professorial Fellow and the School of International Development, Melbourne University Private. He studied Vietnamese in Hanoi in 1979-80 whilst researching his PhD (Cambridge 1982). He has published widely on various aspects of contemporary Vietnam. Readership: Policy makers; decision makers leaders in private and public sectors; academics; consultants; postgraduate students. Contents: Preface Introduction and overview The DRV and the traditional development goals of Vietnamese Communism - what had gone wrong? Vietnamese state industrial reform: policy debates prior to 1979 Neo-Stalinism and its feet of clay - from Reunification to August 1976 The transitional model: a new solution? Spontaneous decentralisation 1979-80 The attempted recentralisation 1980-85 From the 1986 VIth Congress to the end of central planning in 1989-91 State industry: from the early 1990s and the 'big' surprises to the gathering problems of the mid 2000s Conclusions - State industry and the Vietnamese experience