REFORMS IN VIETNAM: IMPERATIVES AND RESPONSES

Focusing on the early Doi Moi years, this article investigates why and how Vietnam embraced market-oriented reforms while maintaining one-party rule. It highlights material imperatives—hyperinflation, food shortages, war legacies and the need for technology and capital—alongside ideological reinterpretations that framed reform as a return to socialist efficiency. The paper details price liberalization, land use rights, foreign investment laws and enterprise reforms, and shows how incremental experimentation reduced political risk. It analyzes distributional effects across rural households, state enterprises and emerging private actors, and explores the social policy adjustments that cushioned vulnerable groups. Externally, the article situates normalization efforts with neighbors and donors, and the gradual reintegration into regional trade networks. The core argument is that credible commitment to reform came from policy learning, decentralized experimentation and selective coalition-building that aligned technocrats, provincial leaders and reform-minded party cadres.

The body first reconstructs macroeconomic stabilization—tightened credit, exchange-rate unification and fiscal consolidation—that tamed inflation and improved incentives. A second section analyzes agricultural transformation: contracting arrangements, household responsibility and the surge in rice output that underwrote export capacity. The third examines industrial and SOE reform, including hard budget constraints, joint ventures and the legal space for small private firms. Governance innovations are discussed: pilot zones, pragmatic regulation and the use of administrative guidance over sweeping legal change to preserve party primacy. The article then assesses external policy—aid coordination, debt rescheduling, and cautious opening to foreign direct investment—linking them to domestic modernization goals. Risk management is a recurring theme: leaders sequenced reforms to minimize elite losers and kept social compacts intact through targeted subsidies. The conclusion reflects on the durability of Vietnam’s hybrid model and the conditions under which efficiency gains translate into broader political adaptation.