ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the findings of the last two chapters, examining the similarities and differences between the opening-up experience of the Vietnamese motorcycle and banking industries. Despite general levels of unevenness in both the industries, their overall trajectory can only be described as a partial case of obligated embeddedness, with Hanoi extracting and embedding some degree of technological and managerial know-how from the foreign investors.
Owing to Vietnam’s suboptimal state structure and bureaucratic conflict, mutually consistent policies between Hanoi and its provinces and inter-ministerial dialogue are not easily forged, leading to substandard formulation of policies. Nevertheless, Vietnam’s heavy (but somewhat ineffectual) presence of the state sector still is following (albeit not entirely smoothly) East Asia’s well-trodden pathway of what Beeson and Pham (2012) term ‘state-led developmentalism’.
