Vietnamese domestic policy: economic strategy and the “shift to services”

The paper discusses recent changes in Vietnamese development strategy: a shift to greater emphasis upon services rather than industry. Given the historical focus of strategy upon the traditional ‘trope’ of factories and an industrial proletariat ‘led by the Party’, this change clearly has significance across many dimensions. The paper explains the policy shift. It then links this strategy, endorsed by the Party, to tensions globally. On the one hand the data shows that developing countries have since the end of the Cold War tended to servicise, not industrialise, with the faster growing countries showing more servicisation (as a share of GDP). On the other, data on research and donor advice shows a continuing and far greater interest in industrialisation. The paper points to published research on Vietnam since 2016 that appears to endorse servicisation. Contrast is made between Vietnam and ‘poster boys’ such as Thailand and Malaysia, praised in the early 1990s as ‘Newly Industrialising Countries’, that now seem to confront relative economic stagnation. Vietnam’s rapid economic growth whilst not implementing the Party’s strategy of ‘Modernisation and Industrialisation’ invites reexamination of the underlying forces driving change in Vietnam.