Introduction

Korea, Malaysia and Thailand are now middle-income economies, with a per capita income ten to forty times Vietnam’s. The Communist Party of Vietnam, which had determined Vietnamese development since the early 1950s, legitimized by its many years of ultimately successful struggle for national liberation, consciously saw the reform policy not as the renunciation of socialism, but as its renewal. The Chinese and Vietnamese reform strategy also differs fundamentally from that pursued by the Eastern European countries and the members of the former Soviet Union in that it forgoes the rapid privatization of state-owned enterprises. Vietnam no longer has many of the options by which the first-and second-generation newly industrializing countries were able to benefit. The transition to the new system will be completed only when Vietnam has caught up with its dynamic neighbors to such an extent that it can be said to have made up for the omissions of the war and post-war periods.