# re: Vietnam @ Sunday, November 19, 2006 10:47 PM

I have to say that I envy your oppertunities to live and work in Asia. Any place so far from home in fact. I also admire how you have jumped in with both feet and really seem to be getting the most from the experience. If you open that Starbucks in Laos let me know and I'll see if I can find some money to invest. :-) I'd bet on you.

AlfredTwo

# re: Vietnam @ Sunday, November 19, 2006 11:52 PM

Count me in! I will even borrow money to invest in such a venture.

Bernard

# re: Vietnam @ Monday, November 20, 2006 12:50 AM

The article is relatively interesting. I learn from him how to write about a country!

Let me distribute to theSpoke 's bloggers the content of an interview with an expatriate who has a larger view on VN for him and the family are living here.

After WTO: The Government ‘s big task

“Setting its feet into WTO, VN has the right to sell much more commodity overseas and is seen as a more attractive destination for many multinational companies.

However, I need to note that VN model is very different from China ‘s one. China has followed what it‘s been a sort of traditional East Asian growth model: if exports are raised, the more foreign exchange achieved. Then the value added – profits are used to reinvest but this time with much more industries. China ‘s Economic growth is based on that.

The difference of VN ‘s situation is that your economic growth is originated from foreign capital not from export. In fact, VN imports more than exports. VN has gained those foreign capital from ODA, FDI, portfolio capital, bond issued abroad and from Vnese people from overseas.There is not anything wrong with them as long as you are making a profit with those investment. But in the end you can never really count on foreign capital for very long , you can’t count on it forever because foreigners may change their mind sometimes they want to come and sometimes they don’t want to come.

Mexico ‘s story after WTO is worth considering about a country a bit got stuck in a trap of cheap labor and slow economic growth. WTO is the first step and the rest is the hard step. It requires the VN government to release a national policy, a technological policy to move up to a higher level making the country become a sophisticated industry or upstream industry.

Intel wishes to do more than parcelling but they said they don’t have enough high quality employees. So you see even you have cheaper labor but employing overseas managers are costly. They don’t want to do that, they want many local managers.

In my opinion, after WTO, the service sector will get much more competition when the protection for the finacial- banking, telecommunications and monopoly for retail and wholesale will dissapear, put this sector into an open market with the demand of higher quality and cheaper service. To compete, VN needs to copy the bigger companies, learn how they operate and manage but quickly I suppose.

I suppose the question is not how much investment you will get next year but the question is how long to get that. There is no seperate audit agency so how can we trust the efficiency of the foreign investment projects

-Jonathan Pincus( UNDP senior economist) ”


P/S. This is our published article on 7th Nov, but you will not find online coz we are into print newspaper basically.

Minh

# re: Vietnam @ Wednesday, November 22, 2006 7:16 PM

Yes, vietnam is very progressive. I was there first half of the year for a few years, and you can see the dynamism of the place.

wilsonng

# re: Vietnam @ Thursday, November 23, 2006 2:40 AM

I might just take you guys up on that offer to help fund a "Starbucks"-like venture. :) In the Philippines there is another similar success story - the name of the coffee escapes my mind right now, but they have really capitalized on the coffee / cafe craze.

Howard

< November 2006 >
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
29	30	31	1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9

Subscriptions

• RSS 2.0
• Atom 0.3
• Contact