FROM “BREAKING THE FENCE” TO INSTITUTION BUILDING: HO CHI MINH CITY'S PIONEERING ROLE IN POLICY EXPERIMENTATION DURING VIETNAM'S ĐỔI MỚI AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIALIST-ORIENTED MARKET ECONOMY INSTITUTIONS (1986–2026)

Апстракт

A substantial body of research has highlighted Ho Chi Minh City's contributions to Vietnam's Đổi mới (Renovation) through its remarkable socio-economic achievements. Building upon these studies, this article adopts a comparative institutional perspective and applies the policy experimentation framework to examine Ho Chi Minh City's role as a policy experimentation arena in the development of Vietnam's socialist-oriented market economy institutions. By analyzing the "breaking the fence" movement during the period 1979–1986, various pilot models implemented between 1986 and 2017, together with two landmark legal documents—Resolution No. 54/2017/QH14 and Resolution No. 98/2023/QH15—the article identifies the evolution of policy experimentation from informal to formal arrangements, from fragmented initiatives to a more systematic framework, and from isolated economic experiments to comprehensive urban governance experimentation. Furthermore, the article proposes the concept of "monocentric policy experimentation" as a preliminary analytical framework for explaining the distinctive characteristics of Vietnam's institutional development and offers several policy implications for the continued improvement of national institutions.