Đổi Mới: the second country to take the bargain
1986 reforms, a collapse in poverty, and the political half left unchanged.
What happened
After a decade of postwar central planning produced stagnation and near-famine, the 1986 Đổi Mới reforms decollectivised agriculture, legalised private business and opened Vietnam to foreign investment.
The results
Vietnam went from a rice importer to one of the world's largest exporters, and the poverty rate fell from over half the population to single digits. The market half worked; single-party rule stayed constant.
Why it happened
Vietnam replicated China's result eight years later, which makes the experiment harder to wave away: what produced the growth in both was prices, private ownership and competition — the opposite of central planning. The party half is a cost, not a cause. Anyone citing Asian growth as a case for state direction is pointing at economies that grew by doing the reverse, and kept the politics that constrains them.
Follow the thread