ABSTRACT
Three decades of rapid economic growth hahaves transformed Vietnam from a poor, agrarian country devastated by war and a failed attempt at central planning to a solidly middle-income country with a diversified, outward-oriented economy. The incidence of poverty has fallen and access to education, healthcare and basic infrastructure, especially in rural areas, is superior to many of Vietnam’s Southeast Asian neighbors. Official statistics report remarkably little change in income inequality, although there are reasons to be skeptical about these claims. There is no reliable information on the distribution of wealth, but some sporadic evidence of concentration of land holdings. Despite broad-based gains, economic vulnerability remains a fact of life for millions of Vietnamese people, especially those working in agriculture or the informal economy, and particularly as the social protection system still favors public-sector and salaried workers. This chapter shows how, by 2020 Vietnam had seen improvements in well-being owing, most proximately, to the expansion of new opportunities to earn wages, salaries and profits. Second, it demonstrates that many improvements in welfare owe to the Communist Party of Vietnam’s sustained political commitment to promoting well-being, reflected in its mix of redistributive fiscal policies and efforts to expand the scope and accessibility of essential services, but that features of Vietnam’s party-state’s fiscal and social policies have at times worked to limit the pace, scope, and sustainability of gains in well-being. Finally, the chapter suggests that accelerating improvements to well-being in the coming decades can be achieved through two sets of policies that Vietnam’s political elite have thus far resisted: policies aimed at expanding access to economic opportunities and policies allowing more scope for labor to organize and demand better wages and improvements in working conditions.
