Happy Fourth of July (or Fifth of July) to all of my American readers! (all 3 of you).
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VIETNAMESE REAL GDP PER CAPITAL (IN 2011 USD). SOURCE: MADDISON PROJECT DATABASE*
Today, I thought I would look at some good news about Vietnam and the world. I found this project, the Maddison Project, that tries to get a very long historical series of economic data. For a few countries, there is data that goes back to the year 1! In France at year 1, per capita GDP was $1,050 (using 2011 dollars). Egypt was $1,225. After that, a lot of years are skipped, but for France the data goes back mostly to annual data in 1280 ($1,053 - no real growth for 1200 years!). Data starts for Sweden at 1300 ($955), Poland at 1400 ($1,050), then Portugal in 1530 ($985). Mexican data starts at 1595 ($562). At 1700, we get yearly data for the United Kingdom - real GDP of $1,591 compared to France at $1,350.
Interesting point: data for South Africa starts at 1700 with GDP of $3,546, which is double the next highest (Spain at $1,730). That must be from all the gold and diamonds. The per capita GDP fluctuates a fair amount but then from 1773 to 1781, it falls 51%. With just a cursory look at timelines, it’s hard to say what drove this. There were some conflicts between colonizers and natives, plus smallpox, but it could be gold and mining prices as well. Real GDP rises again later, but it doesn’t get back to those high levels until 1906 ($3,871). That’s post Boer war and before WWI.
DIFFERENCE IN REAL GDP PER CAPITA - 1950-2016. (USD2011). SOURCE: MADDISON PROJECT DATABASE*
The first piece of data for Vietnam is in 1820 with GDP per capita of $713. This is pretty low, but still higher than Thailand ($692) and the same as the Philippines ($715). Malaysia was well ahead at $1,031. This is the last time that Vietnam is richer than Thailand (according to this data).
Per capita GDP in Vietnam was basically unchanged from 1913 until the 60s, when it started to improve, reaching $1,210 in 1964. But it fell during the later years of the year and didn’t return to that level until 1988. That was momentary before it fell again until 1991. This was after the initial reforms of the Doi Moi, including the Law on Private Enterprises. From then on, it just rose and rose and rose.
We can really see that the war had a very negative impact on the country. Communism didn’t help. Once Doi Moi started and the country opened up, real GDP per capita jumped five times. This is the fourth best among all the countries in the world. And given its strong growth, it probably continued to be up there if we extended it to 2018.
But looking at the overall trend from 1950, Vietnam did not perform as well as many other countries, including its ASEAN neighbors of Thailand and Singapore. Almost 60% of the best performers over this time period are in Asia. Vietnam grew a respectable 6.8x from 1950 to 2016, but again, almost all of that comes from after 1990, when it grew 5.0x to 2016.
If we thought about this in terms of population, things would be more striking, mainly because of the growth of China (16.3x). This is very impressive. India rose just 4.2x (it actually grew more from 1990 to 2016: 4.6x). The US just 3.5x. So China really stands out for its rate of growth for a very large country.
However, Vietnam’s growth is also quite impressive, especially in such a short time period. Let’s hope the country can keep it up, because real GDP per capita was still quite low at $6,031 in 2016.