Round up — VietEcon

There is a bunch of news about Vietnam, but nothing that is so big that it deserves a longer blog post. So today, I thought I would try to run through a few major stories:

Vietnam Airlines can now fly to the US directly: This is long time coming, but Vietnam Airlines can now officially fly directly to North America. Cities included are: LA, San Fran, NYC, Seattle, Dallas, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. The big surprise on the list is Montreal. People with Vietnamese-origin made up just 1% of the city’s population and less than 50,000 total in the province in 2016, and the airport itself isn’t highly ranked in terms of traffic. I guess they just wanted to be comprehensive. I am more surprised by the cities left off: Chicago and Atlanta (huge hubs) and Houston (hub plus large ethnic ties).

Now, I doubt that Vietnam Airlines will start flying to all of these places. I assume it will start with LA and then expand if LA works. But it will be good to finally have a direct flight to/from the US.

Metro delayed, again: One step forward, one step back for transportation. You can now fly direct to LA, but you can’t ride a subway in HCMC until 2021. And they are talking about opening in the fourth quarter, which all but guarantees it won’t open until 2022. And the second line won’t be completed until 2024-2026 (so 2027). Traffic is a real problem. A metro is a real solution. Let’s do better people.

Vietnam will buy more US goods: This was another unsurprising announcement last week (in a Sept. 6 Financial Times story), and something I advised the government to do (see post on September 4, and, yes, I am sure that high level officials of the Vietnamese government read my blog). The Vietnamese government is worried by Trump’s rhetoric, and so it is trying to be as vocal as possible about how it doesn’t like the situation either. It will buy as many American goods as it possibly can, or die trying, goddammit! I expect this will do nothing to the trade balance, but it might help modulate Trump’s anger, which is arguably more important.

Swine flu claims almost 5 million pigs: I love pigs, and hypocritically, I also love pork. So it really kills me that 4.7 million pigs have been culled in Vietnam so far because of swine flu. They don’t get to live, and we don’t get to eat them! That’s almost a fifth of the country’s pigstock. It will probably get worse before its get better. When I had written about this before (July 11), 2.9m pigs had been culled. And there hasn’t been any progress on a vaccine, at least as far as I can tell. This might get worse unless the farmers and government get a handle on it.

Foreigners also causing traffic accidents: Foreigners are involved in 500 road accidents a year in Vietnam. Now that’s basically nothing compared to the number of total traffic deaths (around 23,000 in 2016, based on WHO data). But still, not a good luck for the foreigners. The video attached to the article is pretty funny. Lots of Western guys basically saying: I didn’t know the rules! Or the guy that rented me the motorbike should pay! Or lots of Vietnamese do it too, why am I singled out! I do think that educating the rental companies would be helpful. But ultimately, if you drive in a country, you gotta follow their rules.