Sources of Vietnam's economic growth

This article first estimates Cobb-Douglas production functions for Vietnam's economy using annual data in 1975–2003. Then, the article measures the contribution of capital formation, labour, and technological progress to the growth of the economy, the effects of major internal and external shocks on output, the impact of economic reforms (doi moi) since the end of 1986, the rates of returns to capital and labour. Two major findings are: (1) technological progress was statistically absent in the growth of the Vietnamese economy throughout the study period; (2) the most important source of economic growth is capital accumulation.