Evolution of Competition in Vietnam Industries Over the Recent Economic Transition

Understanding the degree and evolution of competition across industries is an important step towards understanding the impact of economic reform and competition on economic growth in Vietnam during the economic transition. In this paper, the author investigates the evolution of competition in Vietnam during the economic transition using the price-cost margin (PCM) or mark-up that has been widely applied in the economic literature and the profit elasticity (PE) recently developed by Boone in his paper Competition (2000). This paper provides the first empirical study of intensity and evolution of competition across selected industries in Vietnam in the last decade using firm-level data from the Vietnam Enterprise Census (VEC) conducted annually since 2000 by the Vietnam General Statistical Office (GSO)