Thursday, 3 May 2007

Vietnam's booming economy

BBC's business program the other day had a discussion of Vietnam. Three capital fund managers were interviewed and all three were very up-beat. Two, I would guess, were recent arrivals (even though they were both Vietnamese or Vietnamese-Americans) as they had their history pretty wrong. The third was a British fund manager who has been in the country since 1994 and, according to me anyway, seemed to know what he was talking about. Inter alia, he forecast that Vietnam will be the dominant economic power in ASEAN before long. I agree with him, not because he ranted about how the country is only recently opening up to foreign investment (which is what the others did - they clearly weren't there in the mid-'90s), but because he talked about the growth prospects, the education levels and the brilliant organizing ability of local firms. None of them mentioned the role of the government, which has been crucial (as also in China), but doesn't fit with their glorification of the private sector and the market. Maybe this is because businessmen don't like to talk about how dependent they are on government assistance.

None of it, of course, augurs well for socialism (by which I mean democracy and equity).

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