Vietnam making room for private sector

Nguyen Tan Dung, Vietnam’s prime minister, during a late-September visit to New York said the government would move ahead with plans to sell stakes in the country’s top state-owned enterprises.

This followed a meeting on September 17 in Hanoi, in which the State Securities Commission formally recommended to the Ministry of Finance that foreign ownership limits be raised on many listed companies and banks. It is now up to the finance ministry to agree and pass on the recommendation to the state council.

Although many bankers are benchmarking progress around the pipeline of mooted privatisations among state-owned enterprises, the longer-term story is that Vietnam’s growing private sector...