State Enterprise Groups in Vietnam Following Accession to the WTO

Abstract

The state enterprise group (hereafter, SOE group) in Vietnam is classified into two broad types of groups. One is the vertically organized general corporation 91(GC91) which was established on the basis of the Prime Minister’s Decision No. 91 relating to the reorganization of state-owned enterprise (hereafter, SOE) to an experimental SOE group involving key industrial areas, and the other is the horizontally organized General Corporation 90(GC90) which was established on the basis of the Prime Minister’s Decision No. 90, which is the SOE group for all of those industries not included in the key areas of Decision No. 90. Following the enacting of the Company Law of 2005 (which was the integrated common company law for both domestic and foreign-invested companies), the “Business Group” (“tap doan kinh te” in Vietnamese) was added to SOE groups as a new type of SOE group. A part of GC91 and the state insurance enterprise group have now changed their group organization into a business group. It appears that the reorganization of the SOE group led by state policies since 1994 has been affected by the East Asian-style business groups such as the “Keiretsu” of Japan, “Chaebol” of Korea, and the business groups in China, organized following the experience of Japan and Korea (Keister 2000).