Resourcing conservative transition in Vietnam: Rent switching and resource appropriation

Abstract

This article applies a novel approach to analysis of the transition to the market economy in Vietnam, a country with a political economy that draws upon South-East Asian, Sinic and Leninist cultural elements. This was a 'conservative' transition, in the sense that no shift in political regime occurred. Understanding transition as a process where endogenous forces drive and resource institutional change, and far from dependent upon policy shifts, the article argues that it relied heavily upon two sets of phenomena. The first may be understood in terms of the creation and seeking out of economic rents, in the 'neoclassical' sense of resources available 'below economic costs'. When rents result..