Vietnam’s remarkable development turnaround – Arve Hansen

Vietnam is often held up as one of the world’s standout development success stories—rapid growth, dramatic poverty reduction, and a transformation from low-income to middle-income status within a single generation. But what happens when success starts to produce new tensions: rising inequality, changing public services, mounting pollution, and a consumption boom that reshapes everyday life?

Dan Banik is joined by Arve Hansen, Research Professor at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Global Sustainability and author of Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (2022, Palgrave). Together, they explore Vietnam’s development model after Đổi Mới and the paradox of an officially socialist, one-party state delivering a globally integrated “market economy with a socialist orientation.”

Rather than staying at the level of GDP and policy slogans, the conversation moves into the lived experience of development: mobility and the motorbike society, the rising status of car ownership, urban change, air quality, and how shifting diets and “meatification” reflect new middle-class aspirations. Dan and Arve also discuss Vietnam’s push for greener growth and electrification, the politics of land and infrastructure, and why sustainability transitions can become socially and politically sensitive.

Finally, the episode situates Vietnam in today’s unstable global economy (e.g., trade shifts, geopolitics, and growing pressure to diversify) while asking what the next phase of development could look like as Vietnam tries to avoid the middle-income trap and sustain progress in a warming world.

Host:

Dan Banik 

LinkedIn

X: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod

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