Vietnam is a fast growing economy in the Asian region with a significantly high population (over 92 million in 2015). Although still expanding (about 1.1% on average during 2000–2015), the Vietnamese population is considered to be entering the ageing stage at a very high rate. The rapid expansion of the middle-income urban class and the ageing people ratio have dramatically pushed up the demand for healthcare goods, particularly in terms of pharmaceutical products. Since the early 1990s the government has addressed the necessities of rising demand for healthcare products by formulating a series of policies aimed at promoting the development of the pharmaceutical industry. However, the implementation of such policies does not seem to have been completely efficient given that the country still needs to import up to 90% of its pharmaceutical consumption. This paper aims to explore the development of the pharmaceutical industry during the years 1990–2015 and to identify a series of weaknesses in the government promotion of the industry. Future developments will also be discussed on how the Vietnamese pharmaceutical industry could increase its participation in the regional supply chain, which is currently being dominated by big players like India and China.

Foreign direct investments (FDIs) have been widely recognized as a crucial feature of the Chinese industrial development process. Over the past decades, China has been attracting huge amounts of inward FDIs as a consequence of both spontaneous market dynamics and place-based preferential policies at the sub-national level. However, the Chinese market exhibits large dissimilarities in terms of FDI localization across territories that are worth investigating at a more disaggregated level. In this regards, our study explores the determinants of attraction of inward FDIs in China, at the county level. It focuses on the pharmaceutical industry and attempts to assess whether factors related to location advantages, agglomeration dynamics, information cost effects and environmental regulation costs affect foreign firms’ localization choices as well as invested amounts in that location. By means of discrete choice models, our paper confirms the findings of the prevalent literature about the positive effects of location advantages on pharmaceutical FDI attraction. Different from our expectations, a higher proportion of foreign enterprises do not stimulate significant effects on FDI localization, while preferential policies and sectoral agglomeration are positively correlated with the localization of pharmaceutical foreign firms. Finally, our results suggest that investing firms tend to avoid areas with strict environment regulation.

Vietnam has experienced a gradual process of institutional transition combined with rapid economic growth since the Doi Moi reform in 1986. In recent years, the government has recognized the need to implement reforms to foster the development of favourable business environment conditions. In this scenario, however, the government seems to assume a uniform demand for business environment reforms, ignoring possible divergences in the constraints faced by different actors of the system. The aim of this paper is to analyse the heterogeneity in firms’ perceptions of business environment constraints. Adopting discrete choice models on firm-level data and subjective assessments on business environment obstacles, we differentiate the nature and severity of firms’ obstacles according to different characteristics of the enterprises, including the firm size, territorial localization and levels of performance and competitiveness. The study is useful as an informative base for defining public interventions calibrated on the different categories and needs of Vietnamese enterprises.

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