Good Enough for Jazz: Vietnam’s Road to Be an Emerging Market

Abstract

In political economic studies, it is widely discussed the development patterns of most-income countries, especially the ones which are seen, once upon a time, as the “third-world” countries such as Japan, South Korea, China. Although their stories are charming and interesting, for us, the processes that these countries went through constitute very complex and hard-to-believe images for other countries in which, even in today, poverty is literally a crucial problem. On the other hand, there are stories in the economic history which offer, arguably, simpler and trackable ways of development for the countries which are already being suffered by hunger, economic instability such as Sub-Saharan African countries and closed economies of Asia. Vietnam, as an old low-income country, constitutes a hopeful adaptable example to deal with the “scarcity-generating mechanisms” of “under-developed” countries. In this paper, firstly, we are going to describe briefly what were the mechanisms that generate poverty in Vietnam. Then, we will look to how and which legislative, economic regulations and institutions converted a closed, interventionist economy into a coordinated export-oriented one which brought economic growth. Lastly, we will try to understand implications of this economic success and discuss in which ways Vietnam’s road to be an emerging market can constitute a sample for other low-income countries.