ABSTRACT
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been one of the important stimulating factors of the Vietnamese economy in the last 10 years. It grew steadily until the Asian financial crisis began to affect Vietnam in 1998. FDI not only brought into Vietnam foreign capital, technology and management skills that Vietnam needs, but it also helped open up the Vietnamese economy, a tightly closed and highly inefficient economy near the brink of famine in the early 1980s. The FDI demand has put tremendous pressure on the Vietnamese policy makers to adopt substantial economic reforms in order to attract much needed foreign capital.
