Since 1986, Vietnam officially began its transition from a centrally-planned economy towards a market-oriented economy. In parallel to drastic economic reforms, the regulatory environment was improved and enhanced, in order to facilitate this transition. One of the most prominent challenges in a developing country such as Vietnam is the fight against poverty, which both influences and is influenced by the success of these reforms.
This paper analyses the extent to which current wage and labour regulations can help reducing poverty levels in Vietnam. Since Vietnam is planning to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2005, this study timely coincides with the preparatory process. It identifies some of the remaining regulatory gaps necessary to protect the poorer segment of the population. The approach for this study is based on the belief in the human right to have decent employment, including adequate minimum wage and labour standards. For this purpose, the paper evaluates the depth of infiltration of wage and labour regulations in the labour market, using commune level data on wages released in 1998.
What is the purpose of this guide? All doctors progressing through training will need to give thought, and dedicate time, to planning their career. This guide aims to provide trainee doctors, in both primary and secondary care, with an overview of the support options that are available to them.
There is a striking paradox that confronts the reader of that part of the modern literature on Marxian crisis theory written in English. On the one hand, it is evident that monetary and financial problems have been and continue to be at the very center of the recurring economic crises that have afflicted most capitalist economies in the past fifteen to twenty years. These economies have experienced roller-coaster inflation, secular stagnation, domestic credit crunches and recurring waves of bankruptcy.
Simultaneously, the international financial system that guided the general prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s has broken down, giving way to a decade of unpredictable, disruptive gyrating exchange rates. International debt crises of suffocating magnitude ensnare most of the Third World and a good deal of the Second as well. The business press asks with regularity if an international financial collapse of depression-producing magnitude is very likely, or only moderately likely: the answer changes from time to time.
