Industrial Development Policy in Rural Red River Delta: Growing Land and Employment Inequalities - Fanchette, Sylvie (Globalization, Modernity and Urban Change in Asian Cities)
Since the middle of the 1980s, Vietnam has initiated a process of liberalisation with application of free-market principles to its economy and has entered into a phase of rapid urban development. The policy of Renewal seeks to make industrialisation the principal vector of Vietnam’s development and wealth creation. This paper studies the socio-economic and demographic challenges that Vietnam faces to integrate into the international capitalist market, develop its production and provide sustainable employment for a very mobile workforce. It aims to study how the profits of the industrial development are shared among the local population and the migrants and how the rural land is shared among local workshops and large businesses of the formal sector. As a matter of fact, in the province of Hanoi, industrial parks are developing rapidly. They are subject to tax and land policies very favourable for foreign investors. On the macroeconomic front, the performances of companies are very good (in term of level of employment and production for export). However, if we study the local impact of these industrial parks on local employment, land use and social transformations, performance seem less obvious. Industrial parks are in competition for land with craft clusters which employ a large local workforce associated with intensive rice farming, and attract migrants from the north of Vietnam. We observe increase of new inequalities concerning access to land, housing and health. The investigations have been carried out by the author through field surveys, interviews, direct observations in a sample of periurban villages, and maps analyses during 2008 and 2013.
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Keywords: bookSection; craft clusters; industrialization; land issues; metropolization; migrations