Vietnam in transition: SMEs and the necessitating environment for entrepreneurship development

Abstract

A transitional economy has been characterized as experiencing a large amount of economic and social change. SMEs can be considered as the vehicle for entrepreneurship development in such a context. The purpose of this paper is to further the investigation of the favourability of the transitional environment on SMEs and entrepreneurship in Vietnam. Using a new approach, we analyse the transitional economy discourse via examining government policies, international organization reports and academic articles on Vietnam. Our findings suggest that, in Vietnam, compared to an overall normative framework developed from a wide literature review, the settings generally support a vibrant transitional entrepreneurship development and SMEs. However, more needs to be done to build up favourable sociocultural setting and effective business support systems in the country. Implications for the relevant stakeholders and suggestions for future research in the East Asian and Central and Eastern Europe regions are also provided.

The Effects of Regional Governance, Education, and In‐Migration on Business Performance

“…The empirical context of this study is Vietnam. The country has a wide range of local governance quality and a large number of labour movements across regions (Nguyen et al, 2018;Nguyen et al, 2015) that fit well into the theoretical settings of this study. To test the proposed hypotheses, we employ the Annual Enterprise Survey dataset provided by the Vietnam General Statistics Office (GSO).…”

Ambidextrous Leadership, Social Entrepreneurial Orientation, and Operational Performance

“…Luu [15] raises the very issues that we reviewed in the literature. However, Nguyen et al [103] focused on Vietnam, an emerging country with a transitioning Asian socialist economy.…”

Institutional and economic transition in Vietnam: Analysing the heterogeneity in firms’ perceptions of business environment constraints

“…This scenario has led to the suggestion to implement government programmes to reduce the entrepreneurship constraints that characterize the Vietnamese business environment. However, business environment policies can produce asymmetric benefits in the economy as diverse categories of enterprises face different obstacles to their activity, which entails competing policy priorities (Nguyen et al., 2015). This suggests the need to identify the specific obstacles faced by different types of enterprises to define business environment policies calibrated on the diverging demands of the targets.…”

“…Here, subjective perceptions are considered a consistent criterion for understanding the necessities of firms as well as their policy demand (Hallward-Driemeier and Aterido, 2009; Misch et al., 2014). While the approach of the Vietnamese government seems to assume a uniform demand for business environment reforms that is mainly consistent with the needs of the most influential firms (Nguyen et al., 2015), this paper represents an attempt to inform policy debate about the heterogeneity of the necessities and demands coming from different actors of the economy.…”