The North Vietnamese State-Owned Industrial Sector: Continuity and Change

Enterprise reform in the state-owned industrial sector of northern Vietnam is examined in the context of changes in the political and macroeconomic environment of the enterprise. The article argues that reform has been partly a ‘bottom up’ process in which policy makers have been compelled to adapt to changes, often referred to by the Vietnamese as ‘fence-breaking’ activities, in the actual operation of the economy. The transition to a market economy has been a gradual process and those who argue that measures introduced circa 1989 to abolish the key instruments of central planning have succeeded in abolishing central planning itself are mistaken. Many institutional features of the socialist economy persist within the State-Owned Enterprise sector and continue to influence the transition process.