ABSTRACT
After China and Russia, Vietnam, with a population of around 80 million in 2002, is the world’s third-largest transforming economy. Furthermore, the fifty or so years of the post-colonialist period have been strongly influenced by Vietnam’s relationships with China, Russia and the United States. Vietnam’s transformation – just as China’s (see Chapter 5) – presents an alternative route to that undertaken by the former command economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (especially Russia and the Baltic states), where economic reforms have gone hand in hand with the establishment of new, democratic political systems. In Vietnam, economic reform towards a socialist market-economy has taken place within the context of a communist political system. This alternative approach is thus of academic interest and may also be relevant for other former command economies where political transformation has not followed the democratic pattern (as, for example, in the Central-Asian republics of the former USSR).
