China And Vietnam Both Want Foreign Investment, But Is There Enough Capital To Go Around?
This picture taken on January 11, 2017 shows U.S. and Vietnamese flags on the front desk at the Ford automotive plant in the northern province of Hai Duong. (HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images)
Vietnam has enough unique perks to keep attracting foreign investment as China moves to become grab more of the same.
China may not be the world’s factory as it once was before 2012, when the government started pushing investors into cleaner, service-type sectors. But it still manufactures more than $2 trillion in goods per year, and on Monday Chinese Premier Li Keqiang moved to stoke factories by saying they would be fully open to foreign investors, according to the country’s official Xinhua News Agency.
Vietnam happens to be on its own push for foreign-invested factories. Since the post-war 1980s, the fellow Communist country has sought foreign investment as a way to grow its economy. Foreign-invested factories contributed to exports worth $155.24 billion in 2017, a giant slice of the $202 billion Vietnamese GDP, according to data from SSI Research in Hanoi. The industrial production index rose 15.2% year-on-year in the first two months of 2018 compared to 2017 based on a manufacturing “rally,” SSI Research adds. Read more…