Doi Moi and four decades of sustained growth

Vietnam entered the Doi Moi, or renovation, reforms in 1986 as one of the world's poorest centrally planned economies, with GDP per capita around 100 dollars as of 1990 and more than half the population living in poverty. The reforms dismantled collectivized agriculture, opened the economy to foreign trade and investment, and restructured the banking system, splitting what had been a single state monobank into a two-tier system in which the State Bank of Vietnam was narrowed to a true central-banking role while new state-owned commercial banks, starting with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of Vietnam and the Vietnam Bank for Agriculture in 1988, took over lending to the real economy. That institutional separation allowed credit allocation to gradually shift from administrative planning toward something closer to ordinary banking practice, supporting the export-led manufacturing growth that followed. Four decades on, GDP per capita has risen roughly fortyfold to around 4,700 dollars, poverty has fallen to about 2%, and Vietnam has become a major manufacturing hub, a trajectory the World Bank and IMF both describe as one of the most successful transitions from central planning anywhere.