Vietnam is a celebrated development success story, but rapid growth is also reshaping everyday life through rising inequality, changing consumption, and mounting environmental pressures. Dan Banik speaks with Arve Hansen about what Vietnamâs next phase of development may look like and the trade-offs it will require.
Vietnam is often held up as one of the worldâs standout development success storiesârapid 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 Osloâs Centre for Global Sustainability and author of Consumption and Vietnamâs New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (2022, Palgrave). Together, they explore Vietnamâs development model after Äá»i Má»i and the paradox of an officially socialist, one-party state delivering a globally integrated âmarket economy with a socialist orientation.â
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 âmeatificationâ reflect new middle-class aspirations. Dan and Arve also discuss Vietnamâs 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 todayâs 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.
[Dan Banik]
Arve, wonderful to see you in my basement studio.
I've been wanting to have you on the show for many years, but you are here finally.
Welcome.
[Arve Hansen]
Thank you, Dan.
It's really great to be here.
[Dan Banik]
I'm very interested in not just highlighting failures, but also successes.
You know, I've been interested in the question, what works?
And if you look around the world today and you ask people, what are the success stories?
Bangladesh, Rwanda, perhaps Vietnam comes up as one of those examples.
I've been reflecting a bit on the Vietnam story because I was there exactly 20 years ago.
As you know, we were teaching together in those times and I was astounded by what I saw, the entrepreneurial spirit.
There was no lazy people.
People were always doing something, right?
And then there were reforms, of course, before that, fantastic economic growth.
And now we have a situation where people are saying Vietnam is fantastic growth-wise, but there are some also challenges.
So give us a little sense of how you see that economic growth that resulted in well-being, but perhaps also some unintended or intended consequences.
[Arve Hansen]
Vietnam is a fascinating story in many ways.
I'm always interested in just the idea of a communist regime leading this kind of capitalist success story that is hailed also by the World Bank and IMF, for example, as one of the big success stories of development out there.
And it is in many ways, if you look at living standards, if you look at economic growth, although Vietnam tends to very often be overshadowed by its giant neighbor, China, Vietnam has seen some of the fastest economic growth levels in the world over decades, and also some of the fastest reduction in poverty, even some claim faster than China, following much of the same model as China, you could say, although...
This would never be admitted in Vietnam since China.
It's very often a conflicted relationship.
But Vietnam, since its big reforms in the 1980s, has grown at astounding rates, has managed to transform that growth also into kind of societal development.
It's also hailed by the World Bank, for example, as a major success story of pro-poor growth.
It has seen almost all segments of societies seeing major improvements in living standards and of course also has become a manufacturing hub.
Yeah it's a development success story but development tends to come with pros and cons and Vietnam is facing many many challenges.
It's an increasingly unequal society which is a challenge anywhere but perhaps even more so when it's a
[Dan Banik]
Is it the elites who are growing faster there?
Their incomes are growing faster?
[Arve Hansen]
Incomes of elites are growing faster.
Incomes of upper middle classes have grown faster.
It's also unequal in terms of access to information, access to opportunity.
There have been somewhat surprising changes, perhaps, in the healthcare and education systems, where you see...
[Dan Banik]
You mean privatization?
[Arve Hansen]
Privatization, yeah.
Privatization both in general but also within the public sector, so that within the public healthcare and education sectors it's possible to buy better services, for example.
This leads to a lot of challenges, you could say, in terms of an equal access.
This is perhaps even a greater challenge in an ostensibly socialist society than in other societies.
So this is a regime that you could say in many ways depends on this kind of performance-based legitimacy.
There's been much talk about this in China as well.
You get legitimacy through delivering progress.
[Dan Banik]
How is development conceived of?
What is like the national narrative on development?
Is it still focused on jobs?
growth.
20 years ago, I remember buildings sprouting out everywhere in Hanoi.
There was this focus on hotels and tourism and conference centers, roads.
Is it still the same?
[Arve Hansen]
In many ways, it's still the same.
You could say the overall narrative of development in Vietnam has to do with modernization and civilization.
And they're not afraid of using these big words.
I think if you ask leaders in Vietnam what the ultimate sort of developed society looks like, it might be something like Singapore.
Highly modern in this kind of understanding.
And you see this tension in a lot of different things in Vietnam today, where you have this goal of reaching that kind of modern society.
And at the same time, this means that a lot of the typical parts of everyday life in Vietnam don't really fit within that vision.
That could be street vendors, street kitchens, motorbikes.
and the many things that Vietnam are famous for.
So there's this tension now, but in many ways, I think your observation from 20 years ago still counts.
I think new buildings, new infrastructure is a very central part of development, but also industrial upscaling, increasingly also green growth.
Vietnam has embraced this idea of the net zero society, for example, and have like
other countries in the region.
I should add set goals of becoming the sort of green battery of Southeast Asia.
They have long had hydropower, but are now also increasingly focusing on wind power and solar power.
Overall, I would say it's a kind of understanding of development that we would recognize from modernization theory, but with constantly new add-ons and new twists and turns.
[Dan Banik]
I have to give my wife credit for two sort of ideas she put in my head 20 years ago when we were in Vietnam and later on when she spent some time with me in China.
The first thing she said was, I've never come to a socialist country that is as capitalist as...
as China.
And she said the same thing in Vietnam.
And I remember, you know, visiting Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum.
And as you know, you stand in line and then you walk past the body and then you're guided downstairs to a refreshment area.
And while everything in the mausoleum was very somber and dark and gray, as soon as you came downstairs, I don't know if it's still the case, there were these huge billboards with Coca-Cola.
It was capitalism at its best.
And so that contradiction, officially socialist as in China and yet so capitalist, that's one thing.
The second thing that my wife and I discussed was capitalism.
If you remember those days, two and a half decades ago, there was still talk about this Asian values and that East Asia was different.
And talking about Singapore, the leaders of Singapore and Malaysia, et cetera, they were saying, we have grown because of a certain model, respect for family and culture and savings rather than just spending this thriftiness, hard work.
respect for authority, family relations.
These are some of the features that have made some of these East Asian success stories such a success.
And of course, this Asian values hypothesis was debunked saying, oh no, I mean, this is not Asian values.
This is just a justification for autocratic rule, not democracy.
But I have to say that when we were in Vietnam, when I never saw, Vivek and I never saw anybody just relaxing, by the way.
There was always this entrepreneurial spirit.
I began to actually wonder whether I was wrong about criticizing this Asian values hypothesis.
So I think there's this kind of this inbuilt
tension right i mean you see people i don't remember thinking that people are reliant on a welfare state people felt at least the the impression i got you have to fend for yourself you have to do something and there's this kind of this urgency to do something about your life whether it is you know from your own terrace you have a restaurant i mean people being so innovative and that amazed me
[Arve Hansen]
Yeah, these are good observations, I think.
When it comes to this combination of capitalism and socialism, this is endlessly fascinating, I think.
I've often used the example of brand new BMWs passing the presidential palace in Hanoi underneath neon signs of hammer and sickle, you know.
But if you ask the kind of official story of development in Vietnam from the government side, from the regime side,
It's not capitalism.
It's the market economy as a tool for delivering progress.
And there's been a lot written in Vietnamese about this, on how Vietnam proved Marx wrong, in a sense, by showing that a market economy can work in a socialist society.
So this is the official story about the kind of development model that... What about the developmental state?
[Dan Banik]
Do they subscribe to that idea?
[Arve Hansen]
Yeah, they don't necessarily use that term, but they have a lot in common.
There's a lot of inspiration we had from Japan, from South Korea, the big developmental states from the past.
There are many differences from that model, but the overall idea of the state being able to lead...
and deliver development, certainly.
[Dan Banik]
State-directed development.
[Arve Hansen]
Yes, yes.
Although the critics would say that the Vietnamese state has not been able to develop the same kind of capacity to deliver development that the Japanese and the Korean had.
But certainly a lot of inspiration, also direct inspiration.
Japanese foreign development assistance, for example, has been quite active in Vietnam.
There's also...
There's a lot of Korean industry invested in Vietnam and so on.
But you're right.
There is certainly Vietnam has opened up for capitalism, although they will not want to use that term.
But officially, it's a socialist market economy or the market economy with a socialist orientation.
[Dan Banik]
And when I was there last, I kept hearing this term doi moi.
So that, apparently, 1986, you have this reform being initiated.
Doi moi, I think it means what?
Renewal, innovation, something new, opening up, right?
And that ushered, these reforms ushered in a new era, which facilitated this kind of growth.
And you see this in China, you see this in many other countries, that the first step is this opening up, making it easier for foreigners to invest.
And also, you know, this huge problem that countries like India have had, this license raj, that the state acts more like an impediment.
Right.
to entrepreneurship, to investments, those impediments, these barriers are removed.
So tell us a little bit about the impact of the Doi Moi.
And what is particularly interesting is now you have a similar new wave of reforms, I believe, are being initiated by some of the ruling party members.
And I'd like to know, Arvind, what are the similarities and differences?
I mean, is the first phase over?
Now we're in a new phase?
[Arve Hansen]
Yeah, that's a good question.
Yeah, so Doi Moi, as you said, it means turn to something new, or it's very often translated as renovation, both inside and outside of Vietnam.
And so it can mean renovation as well.
It was officially initiated in 1986.
Many would say that many of the reforms happened before, and many of the key reforms actually happened later.
But 1986 is, as you rightly point out, the key year when this new turn was started, with clear inspirations from China.
And also, interestingly, Vietnam also directly influencing Laos in doing something similar in the same year, 1986.
The Doi Moor reforms came with a lot of different things.
Some of the key ones are seen in just the opening up for the private sector.
And especially back then, the state is still in the driver's seat.
State-owned enterprises have been very central in Vietnam.
But you started removing, as you said, barriers for the private sector to be invested in development.
And very importantly, started modernizing agriculture.
Agriculture in Vietnam is still relatively small scale, but the changes that have happened in the agricultural sector are seen as key to the kind of progress that Vietnam has gone through, especially when it comes to poverty alleviation, because many poor people, most people lived in rural areas.
Actually, they still do.
So that's one of the key sectors.
And then it's the industrial side of things, where you had mainly state-owned enterprises,
they have gradually pulled back or gradually been equitized, as the formal lingo goes, which is a form of privatization.
But you still have state-owned enterprises in some key sectors, in telecommunications, for example, in petroleum and energy.
But there's a lot more private companies involved.
And another key part of the Doi Moi process was this kind of global integration, both politically and economically.
So back then, 1986, Vietnam was almost completely isolated, internationally speaking.
So the Soviet Union was collapsing.
That was back then Vietnam's only ally, more or less.
Even China was not an ally.
China had indeed invaded Vietnam just a few years earlier, and Vietnam had invaded Cambodia.
So at the time, in the 1980s, Vietnam was completely isolated.
It was in many ways seen as reforms for survival.
So actively reintegrating in the world was a key part of these reforms.
And this was usually successful over time.
So during the 1990s especially, you saw this normalization of relationship both with the US and with China.
And gradually Vietnam became a key member of global society, if you can call it that.
So that was key.
And with it also foreign direct investments.
Foreign investments have been crucial in Vietnam's development model.
And it still is today.
And we have seen also that Vietnam in many ways have benefited from the tensions between the US and China, both between those tensions and, or you could say benefited from China becoming, even more so than before, development success story with higher living standards, higher wages, right?
So a lot of capital has moved from China into Vietnam.
Look at companies like Samsung that produces a very large part of their mobile phones, for example, in Vietnam today.
I think it's more than 50% of all mobile phones, Samsung phones produced in the world are produced in Vietnam.
So this is a key part of the development success story as well.
[Dan Banik]
What about what has changed now?
What is this new reform?
What is the focus then?
[Arve Hansen]
It's a bit early to tell.
So we have a new general secretary, Tolam.
He's been presented, I think it was the economist put it something like the least likely and most influential reformist in the world right now.
Tollam comes from the party system.
He's been holding key positions in the party for a long time.
He comes from the military.
He's a general.
He is not this kind of communist or Marxist-Leninist ideologue as we've seen in the past.
So he's something new in that sense.
And he has said that this will be a sort of age of renewal for Tollam.
He has started out with major reforms in the public sector, looking to make the public sector much more efficient than before.
It has caused a lot of worry also inside.
It involves a lot of people losing their jobs, for example.
It's a bit too early to tell exactly what it entails, but we could guess that it's a more market-friendly approach, perhaps.
What some critics worry about, I guess, is that it would also involve, with this kind of background that Talam has, and with the relationship to the military and the police,
that it could also involve a step towards the kind of China model of recent years, where we have seen under Xi Jinping a much stricter authoritarian approach to development.
In many ways, Vietnam has represented a kind of softer approach to the same model.
So that, I guess, on the pessimistic side, some are seeing that this could be the path that Vietnam will be taking now.
It's also seen as an age where Vietnam needs to upscale their industrial sector.
So they cannot rely on the same kind of labor-intensive manufacturing as they have with all the clothes and the shoes and kind of labor-intensive parts of technological production and so on.
[Dan Banik]
I was thinking that Vietnam perhaps is in that stage where, as you know, there are many countries in the world that have witnessed, achieved fast economic growth.
Many even on the African continent, Tanzania, Ethiopia, just examples.
But not all of these countries are able to translate that growth into social protection, into poverty reduction, into investments for general well-being.
And if I recall, some of the debates I was exposed to again 20 years ago, but also I've been reading about are these scandals related to corruption.
This is something where, you know, Vietnam perhaps has something similar with the China model.
One of the things that Xi Jinping did was this huge crackdown on corruption.
Whether it is successful or not is still early to tell, but some very well-known, you know, scandals have been unearthed and people have been put in jail.
And there have been some of these scandals also in Vietnam.
I think there was a woman who was a real estate tycoon or something like that.
Yeah, like banking.
I don't remember.
But there have been these high profile things.
So I suppose Vietnam is naturally in that phase where it is consolidating the gains.
So that's one thing in order to improve social services because there's still poverty.
Rural poverty, as you mentioned.
The other thing that has changed is globalization.
And the US played a very important role in bringing China into this fold, this globalized fold.
And the US, as you said, also played a very important role in integrating Vietnam into the global economy.
Vietnam, very much like India in the last decade or so, was used by the US to counterbalance China.
So suddenly India and Vietnam were being sent jobs, you know, outsourcing things and textile production or shoes or footballs.
I don't know.
You know, so all of this is happening.
And now we're seeing the opposite, that these countries, including India and Vietnam, that were being used to counterbalance China's influence, are now being slapped with these huge tariffs.
And suddenly, I suppose, Vietnam is in that situation where it's like looking for new friends.
Now, I'm told that the 46% initial tariffs have been scaled down to 20%, but even that is bad.
It's going to affect Vietnam.
So Vietnam needs to diversify, right?
[Arve Hansen]
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Exports to the US represent something like a third of GDP in Vietnam.
It's absolutely essential.
It's basically the US and China.
And as you said, the US has had a kind of positive approach to Vietnam, but also the other way around.
And this is hard for many Westerners to understand because we...
always tend to think of the war, the American War, as it's called in Vietnam.
And this just isn't part of the story in Vietnam.
It's a long time since the Vietnam War, American War, was an important part of the story.
It's still there as sort of...
this great victory.
The young people don't have... No, they don't have any relationship to this at all.
If anything, it's the war against China 1,000 years ago.
That's like the big national narrative in Vietnam, you could say.
So this relationship to the US isn't, from a Vietnamese perspective, problematic in itself.
What is problematic is, of course, when Trump starts to say that, he even said in his first period, he said Vietnam is even worse than China.
[Dan Banik]
Is ripping off the US.
[Arve Hansen]
Yes, ripping off the US.
So this is a big, big worry.
And you already see Vietnam looking even more so towards China than before and towards South Korea and towards other countries to diversify.
Because at the moment, although they are able to negotiate these tariffs to some extent, even 20%, as I said, it's a big deal.
So had Vietnam put all their eggs in this one U.S.
[Dan Banik]
basket?
[Arve Hansen]
I don't think they intentionally did so, but there was a lot of investment from the U.S.
So we also need to remember that a big part of this trade surplus that Vietnam has to the U.S.
is American companies producing things like Nike, for example, producing their products in Vietnam and shipping them back to the U.S.
[Dan Banik]
And I'm told that the 20% is actually, it's higher if a product is produced in Vietnam, but is shipped to the US from another country.
[Arve Hansen]
If it comes through Vietnam from another country, it's higher.
So that then is 40 something percent.
So that's in order to ensure that China doesn't trans-ship products through Vietnam.
[Dan Banik]
But this is creating worry, I can imagine.
[Arve Hansen]
I think at the moment, Vietnam is not entirely sure how to deal with this.
But it's looking towards other countries.
But it's also relying on the US in a more kind of geopolitical sense.
Since in Vietnam, the big worry in terms of its territory, for example, is China.
And there's a lot of tension in terms of the South China Sea, as it's called in China, and the East Sea, as it's called in Vietnam, for example.
So a lot of tension ongoing.
And the US has been an important guarantee for security for Vietnam in that sense.
So keeping a good relationship to the US is very, very important.
[Dan Banik]
But let's return to the national context, because we started by talking about the paradox, and as I mentioned that.
So you have economic growth that has been relatively successful, the distribution perhaps some success, but it could have been better.
Inequality is rising, there's been corruption, some public services are not very efficient.
But it was interesting to hear you say that agriculture was the focus, which is also very similar to China.
There was an explicit focus on the primary sector, which many other countries did not.
India, for example, did not really always have a consistent focus on the agricultural sector and reforms.
It was industrialization, agriculture.
So that has a lot of similarities.
There are some other aspects of this capitalist development, and you and I love development.
We want there to be more of a focus on global development, even though there's a lot of focus on climate and sustainability.
But it's not like these are unimportant.
And we see in Vietnam some of these consequences of this high-speed development having effects on air quality.
on transportation and I know you've written a lovely book on motorcycles and that's also something I vividly remember.
It's Kathmandu and Hanoi that remind me of motorcycles because they're just everywhere and you can't cross the street because they're everywhere.
But this also, while giving people freedom, empowering people, you're cutting out the public transport, which wasn't good, you can just bike anywhere, is also creating challenges, whether it's traffic, pollution.
I know you've also been writing about cars, which is also another symbol of inequality.
If you have a car, then you have money.
Tell us a little bit about some of the maybe sustainability challenges from this consumption that has radically increased.
I was thinking of health.
I mean, if you have seen this in other countries in South Asia, for example, people
People don't walk anymore.
They're just driving everywhere.
They're eating Western types of food, this Western diet and focus on meat.
I know you're interested in the meatification strategies.
So on health, on transport, on air quality, we're seeing some of those negative consequences of this success in economic development.
[Arve Hansen]
Yes, absolutely.
So there's a lot of kind of sustainability challenges in Vietnam today.
One of them is that irrespective of what Vietnam does within its border is one of the countries that is going to suffer the hardest consequences from climate change, for example.
So that's one challenge.
But then also a wide range of challenges when it comes to, for example, soil degradation, it comes to water pollution, it comes to waste management, and when it comes to, as you said, air pollution.
Suddenly, cities like Hanoi have started figuring on the top of these lists of the most polluted cities in the world.
And that's a quite recent thing.
And this can be explained by...
on one side, industrial development, and on the other, as you said, consumption, especially than mobility, right?
So much more traffic in the cities, more cars on streets that are unable to accommodate them, and millions and millions and millions of motorbikes, of course,
Last count was 76 million motorbikes in Vietnam for a population from around 100 million, which is quite incredible.
It's not something that you see.
So every household has one?
Every household has one.
Actually, on average, in cities now, every household has two and a half.
Oh, God.
So there's a lot.
And these are electric?
They are not electric.
They're not mainly electric.
This is a change that is happening now and that we're going to see a lot more of, especially since... So the motorbike has, in many ways, transformed everyday life in Vietnam.
And it's an absolutely essential commodity for everyday life, for making life, everyday logistics hang together.
But when it was new, it was seen to be a luxury, right?
And now it's just a necessity.
Yes, yes.
So I remember when I was doing my PhD work where I focused on mobility, and this is more than 10 years ago.
Back then, cars were quite a novelty.
So when I wanted to talk to car owners, people would always have someone they would point me to.
Oh, look, you should talk to this guy.
He has bought a car.
And if I said, but I want to talk to motorbike owners, and they just looked at me and said, you can talk to anyone.
Why do you want to talk about motorbikes?
Yeah.
And, but for me, that was, I started gradually realizing back then that the motorbike is the most important, most interesting part of the story here.
This is something, this kind of motorbike society that Vietnam has that influences every part of everyday life.
[Dan Banik]
What is the good and the bad and the ugly with all of these motorcycles?
[Arve Hansen]
The bad is certainly the air pollution, but also the high levels of traffic accidents and so on.
The positives are in terms of the mobility that they offer.
So in cities like Hanoi, you could say in cities anywhere, car dominance doesn't really work.
It leads to gridlocks and traffic jams.
What about public transport?
Public transport is there, and it's something that is being developed, but it's very slowly developed.
I think the last number that I saw was that public transport in a city like Hanoi is able to accommodate for something like 5% of the transport needs.
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, other cities in Vietnam, they don't work without the motorbike.
It's an absolutely essential part of everyday life.
It's not favored by the government, you could say, by authorities.
Why not?
I think there are many reasons for it, but I think it's seen as kind of unruly and perhaps a little bit uncivilized.
It's not part of that modern image of, or the image of the modern city, of the modern society.
And this is something that has changed quite dramatically with reforms and this tension, as you said, between capitalism and socialism.
Not that long ago, owning a car was
would be seen as excessive consumption.
Today owning a car is kind of expected if you belong to the upper middle classes and upwards.
And there's actually many major Vietnamese cities are planning to ban motorbikes from all central areas of the city.
Hanoi is one of them.
That can be potentially very unpopular.
Very unpopular indeed, can be.
It seems now that it will not involve electric
electric motorbikes could enter for me the biggest surprise first was that cars are not banned motorbikes are banned but not cars because cars are the ones that are really clogging up the streets a car demands something like seven times the space as a motorbike and we know that a motorbike doesn't necessarily have just one person on it right yeah so this new ban is planned to take effect from 2030 but electric motorbikes will be exempted from it
[Dan Banik]
When I was last in Beijing last year, almost all of those mopeds, and they were just being used by these delivery app, the drivers delivering food and groceries, they were using, and they were all electrified.
And that was the difference I saw.
Before you'd have bicycles in China, now you have mopeds, and they're almost all electrified, in addition to the cars.
Now, as you know, China is the big EV developer.
Something similar is not happening in Vietnam, but it's kind of
[Arve Hansen]
Push for EVs?
I think it will.
I think we see the beginning of it.
So China actually banned motorbikes long time ago in most cities.
You only have the electric ones.
And what you see in Vietnam now is that one of the, or not one of, the biggest private conglomerate, the Vinh Group, has started producing cars.
It's the first Vietnamese car.
Electric.
And it's electric.
And they even tried to export it.
So far, it hasn't been successful.
But they're also producing electric motorbikes, mopeds.
that look quite a bit like the scooters and motorbikes that we see in Vietnamese cities today.
So with that happening, and also a lot of other actors entering that kind of race for electric mobility, combined with this ban, it's quite likely that transport will be electrified in Vietnam as well.
But right now, and especially for cars, you don't have the infrastructure for it.
[Dan Banik]
Right, but there's also something else.
I know I read in your book that the demand for electricity has expanded massively with industrialization.
You need more energy.
And this is something that, at least in Asia, the grid has been expanded.
Almost all countries have very good access, unlike the African continent where it's still lagging behind.
But there are some other challenges with this, right?
And one of the things I read in your book is how traditional Vietnamese houses were built.
I think you lived in one of those that somehow guaranteed that it was cool, the way it was built, the big windows, the flow of air.
Even in the summer months, it was bearable.
But now with, of course, traffic, with all this pollution, with all the emissions, with global warming, high rise buildings, you have much more congestion and then you have a greater reliance on air conditioners.
Yes.
But I'm also told that there's a growth in air purifiers.
So you have very similar things to what I've experienced in Chinese cities.
So, I mean, what is the discussion like?
What is the national discussion on motorcycles, on cars, on this kind of growth that is creating pollution?
What are people asking for?
because nobody wants to relinquish the benefits of economic growth, but one wants green growth, pro-poor growth, different types of growth.
Is there a national conversation?
And if so, what kind of a conversation?
[Arve Hansen]
there is i think it's very much a kind of green growth conversation conversation about basically electrifying development so this will come with challenges as i mentioned earlier vietnam has had a a very large hydropower sector it's it's far from meeting the demand for electricity today so there's also a lot of coal being used
and there's talk about nuclear energy, and there's a lot of talk about solar and wind power.
One of the big challenges that I see very often is not addressed in these conversations is that the most, you could say, sensitive or problematic in many ways part of development in Vietnam today has to do with land.
And this is where you see the most tensions, the most protests against the government, because there are actually...
for many surprisingly many protests they're just very small scale so the state owns all land and you can have land use rights you can rent land basically but the state can also take back land whenever it wants to and you will be compensated but you will be compensated at the rate that is a lot lower than what is worth on the market
I haven't really seen a big discussion of how this will be solved since if you're going for solar power, for example, it requires a lot of land.
It requires huge areas of land that you don't really have unless you start using agricultural land for it, of course, which again raises a lot of tension.
So I think there's a tension there that will be faced.
But in terms of a conversation about greener development, I think there is clearly a wish for more sustainable societies, healthier societies.
There hasn't been too much of a push for it.
There's been some.
If you asked me a few years ago about this, I would say that there's a new kind of civil society emerging that is pushing for greener development in Vietnam.
They started with, for example, the trees movement, which was a student-led movement, kind of spontaneous in many ways, against a policy or a decision by local authorities in Hanoi to cut down a significant amount of the many trees that the city is proud of.
And this movement was able to...
stop it, or at least to reduce the number of trees being cut down.
And this was seen by many as the start of a new thing, the green civil societies emerging in Vietnam.
They also played a role, not the trees movement, but the kind of greener civil society or green civil society movements in conversations about cleaner energy in Vietnam.
Vietnam has been quite strategic in its Paris Agreement approach, for example, by saying that we can reduce emissions by 8% versus business as usual scenarios.
If we do it alone, if we get international support, we can reduce by 25%.
and managed to get quite a lot of support, including from countries like Norway.
But these donor countries then demanded that civil society was also part of it.
And many civil society leaders who were part of these conversations were part of securing a deal for investment in green energy in Vietnam.
And after this, almost all of them had been arrested.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, I was going to say that it isn't easy to have these discussions, critical discussions, criticisms of or advocating unpopular policies.
Stop building this or do it in a more costly way in a non-democratic setup.
I mean, it can't be easy.
But I wanted to ask you something about food, because I mean, I love Vietnamese food, as I know you do and many others around the world.
But even food, the traditional Vietnamese food and the cuisine and the food habits are changing because of this capitalist-led development.
And as I understand it, there's been a much more, there's an explosion in the use of meat.
But meat was always there in the Vietnamese cuisine, right?
Are people eating more meat because they have more money now?
[Arve Hansen]
There are many different reasons that this is.
But yeah, Vietnam has seen a massive increase in meat consumption.
There are the most obvious ways that this is happening is through, if you look at Western fast food chains and so on that are suddenly there.
They're cool, right?
To be.
Yeah.
And they are, you know, and at the beginning they were very popular.
They haven't actually been as successful as you would expect it.
But you have McDonald's everywhere?
You have McDonald's, not everywhere, but McDonald's have a few restaurants in Vietnam.
KFC?
KFC, quite a lot.
Quite a lot of KFC.
A few Burger King.
But you have a lot of Lotteria, for example, which is a Korean fast food chain.
And you have a lot of barbecue places, including Korean barbecues.
But in many ways, the most important way in which meat consumption has increased is through just kind of meatification of traditional dishes.
So if you buy a pho, the famous noodle soup back in the days would have very little meat in it, although it's always been cooked on pho.
on bones and meat but now it has a lot of meat in it so it's kind of this gradual increase in meat intake which has been made possible through meat supply and increased meat supplies and the needs of the middle class i would imagine the middle class is pushing forward
[Dan Banik]
This kind of trend, right?
[Arve Hansen]
Yeah, in many ways.
So this relationship between supply and demand is always dynamic, right?
So the middle class is seeking new types of food and supply is meeting it, but also creating the demand for new types of food.
There's also a lot more imports of meat than in the past.
So suddenly it's cheaper to buy meat, chicken, for example, from Brazil or the US than to buy it from your neighbor.
[Dan Banik]
Very similar to China.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we're seeing in East Asia, Latin America has become a very, Brazil is a very important provider, right?
Yes.
Soya and meat.
Yes.
And it's cheap, you say, to get it from Brazil?
[Arve Hansen]
It's cheaper than, often it's cheaper than domestic produce.
So that's, and this is how globalization works in many ways, right?
So these massive poultry farms in the US and Brazil is able to provide meat at a very...
[Dan Banik]
And is there any pushback in Vietnamese society towards this increased meatification?
[Arve Hansen]
There is a skepticism towards this kind of industrially produced meat, but you see that it's gradually becoming weaved into everyday food practices.
But there is quite some pushback towards the meatification, I would say.
It's too early to say whether it will actually influence overall consumption levels, but it's quite common now to hear that people want to eat less meat.
And this is something that I'm also going to be digging more into in a new research project that we just started on meat replacement in Asia.
But the main reason for cutting back on meat is
is not the environment or not animal welfare, but health.
So it's seen as unhealthy to eat as much meat as they're doing.
So many would tell me that they're told by the doctors, for example, they should eat less meat.
It's also the national health authorities have said the same.
[Dan Banik]
Well, it seems that Vietnam, this kind of message is at least resonating in Vietnam than in Norway and many other countries.
Our countries, if you tell people don't eat meat because you're for hell, they'll say, who are you?
And forget about the climate.
This is a part of our culture.
But Arvind, we're getting to the end of our conversation.
I'd like you to please reflect on the way forward.
We have a relatively successful case of development, distribution, increased wellbeing, poverty reduction, but also inequality and consumption-fueled environmental challenges.
The geopolitics we've already discussed is creating new barriers, new challenges, but there's also, I would imagine, with the rise of a middle class, there will be growing dissatisfaction with how the state is operating, with corruption not being controlled, or the party deciding on everything.
There surely will be greater challenges to the state
and increased demands for democracy, more freedoms.
How do you see those demands being met and going forward?
Do you think Vietnam will become a democracy in the next decade?
[Arve Hansen]
That's a million-dollar question.
I doubt it, but I...
I don't know.
I really don't know what will happen.
Vietnam has surprised everyone in the past.
I think a more likely scenario would be something like the Singaporean model, where you have... Soft authoritarianism.
If any kind of change in that direction, I think that's more likely, and that you have a kind of democratic system where you have different parties you can vote for, but in reality, there's one party in charge.
But it's just as likely that Vietnam goes more in the China direction of a harder authoritarian line.
So we don't know.
So far, the middle classes in Vietnam have been quite regime friendly, I would say, like in China.
But we don't know if it will stay like that, of course.
But so far it has been.
So it's difficult to predict.
One of the most influential Vietnam scholars outside of Vietnam, Jonathan London,
He had a book on politics in Vietnam 10 years ago, where he thought that major changes were happening then.
And there were good reasons for believing that.
Since then, he has also seen that it just didn't happen.
And those kinds of reformers back then were stopped or they changed their tracks and so on.
So right now, no one is kind of expecting that.
Vietnamese politics is a black box for outsiders.
[Dan Banik]
And I was just thinking, if the state continues to deliver development, visible development, then that satisfaction will not grow into a revolution or...
[Arve Hansen]
No, probably not, if there is even room to do that, to kind of protest in that way.
But no, I think as long as Vietnam continues to deliver development, which often takes the form of consumption, for example, then I don't think we will see major changes.
But it's, of course, hard to predict.
I think whatever will happen on the...
the political side, and there are a lot of worrying things in Vietnam in terms of human rights records and so on.
Whatever will happen there, I think Vietnam will become more important on the economic side of things.
And I think we are likely to see Vietnam that continues delivering development and becoming an increasingly important...
global player in terms of industrial development, for example.
But there are also major challenges to overcome there.
So Vietnam has been hugely successful in getting to where it is now.
And this is hugely successful compared to almost any country in the world.
that has tried to get out of a low-income or underdeveloped, as some would say, state.
But this is a very difficult next step, right, to move out of this kind of middle-income category.
If you want to become a high-income country, very few countries have succeeded in doing so in the past, in recent decades at least.
how it will achieve that and how it will manage to both diversify in a difficult global climate at the same time as it's countering sustainability challenges global sustainability challenges and domestic ones at the same time deliver more equitable growth and i think diversifying its economy also in terms of upgrading its industry and so on i think these are major challenges so
But Vietnam has showed in the past that it's able to really deliver long-term development progress.
I think we're likely to see continued economic progress, but I don't dare to speculate too much about the political world.
[Dan Banik]
Arve, thank you very much for sharing your experiences.
Congrats on your two new books and for coming on my show today.
Thank you.
[Arve Hansen]
Thank you so much for having me, Dan.
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