Back to normalcy
/That headline’s not just for Vietnam, which is now back to normal after all the departure of SO MANY foreign leaders (Trump! Kim! Lavrov!), but also for me. Your friendly blogger was waylaid by a cold but am now back close to normal. Because I missed so much, I wanted to do a quick round-up of the interesting stories that I missed.
Here is a good article by Michael Tatarski in the Atlantic about the summit and how the Vietnamese handled it. A few things struck me. Frist, the government of Vietnam just doesn’t know how to deal with international press. Second, authoritarian regimes are so much “better” at hosting these kinds of summits because they can just shut down everything, including protests. While leaders, even of democracies, prefer a totally controlled environment, us regulars probably should not. Protest is important, even more so when there are so few avenues for free speech in these countries. Of course Trump didn’t bring up any human rights issues with Vietnam (or Kim, for that matter, and Trump took Kim’s word about the death of Otto Warmbier, the American who died in North Korean custody). And finally, Tartarski’s big takeaway is that the government of Vietnam benefited the most, as I expected on February 22 (scroll down).
As part of the summit, we saw lots of aircraft orders, $21 billion in total, according to this article. VietJet will buy 100 Boeing 737 Max jets valued at $12.7bn, although this was actually announced back in July 2018. GE will provide and service some engines for $5.3bn, and Bamboo will buy 10 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner jets for $3 billion. So basically, not that much new but a good press release for Trump.
Vietnam is having problems moving up the value chain in tea. It appears that almost every year this decade, tea exports from Vietnam have fallen, including in 2018 when they were down 8.4% in volume and 3.4% in value. 2017 was similar, as was 2016 and 2015. Basically, the world has too much low quality tea, and that’s not going to change. Vietnam, despite centuries (millenniums?) of tea growing, still cannot produce high quality tea at large volumes. This seems to be the case with lots of Vietnam’s agricultural exports (and other exports). The country is going to have to move up the value chain to really compete. It has the benefit of the current US-China trade war to grab some export volume, but it also needs to charge more for the exports they already have.
The government is going to install traffic cameras nationwide by 2022. It will start with trials in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by 2020. One the one hand, great! Too many vehicle and pedestrian deaths in Vietnam. Start slapping some real fines on people for reckless driving. On the other hand, the government already has a lot of control and surveillance over its people. The “gold” standard for this is London, where there is approximately 1 camera for every 14 people. As residential security camera prices fall, we could start to see this everywhere. I know lots of friends in Washington DC that have their own cameras, and new technologies for smart homes add cameras as well. So maybe Vietnam is just going the way of the developed world, but without the developed world’s view of individual rights.
Finally, a small thing. Lufthansa is doubling its aircargo capacity to HCMC from one flight a week to two. This isn’t that big a deal, and it is hard to separate the reasons for this: is it Vietnam’s growing economy or the fact that Vietnam is taking business from China? But it’s good news. Better connections mean that things just become easier. If you need to get something to Frankfurt from HCMC or from HCMC to Frankfurt, you can now do it 2x a week.
I am not sure exactly what I am going to look at this week, so keep checking back to find out!