Is Vietnam the Next ‘Asian Miracle’? The country is making autocratic capitalism work unusually well. ........ Using mass texts, TV ads, billboards, posters and loudspeakers, the government exhorted the nation’s 100 million citizens to identify carriers and trace contacts, contacts of contacts, even contacts of contacts of contacts. Rapid isolation of outbreaks has kept Vietnam’s death rate among the four lowest in the world — well under one death per million people. ......... Containing the pandemic allowed Vietnam to quickly reopen businesses, and it is now expected to be the world’s fastest growing economy this year. ......... Even more impressive, its growth is driven by a record trade surplus, despite the collapse in global trade. ........... After World War II the “Asian miracles” — first Japan, then Taiwan and South Korea, most recently China — grew their way out of poverty by opening to trade and investment and becoming manufacturing export powerhouses. ............ Even as global trade slumped in the 2010s, Vietnam’s exports grew 16 percent a year, by far the fastest rate in the world, and three times the emerging-world average. ............ While other emerging countries spend heavily on social welfare in an effort to appease voters, Vietnam devotes its resources to its exports, building roads and ports to get goods overseas and building schools to educate workers. .................. Over the last five years, foreign direct investment has averaged more than 6 percent of G.D.P. in Vietnam, the highest rate of any emerging country. Most of it goes to building manufacturing plants and related infrastructure, and most of it now comes from fellow Asian countries, including South Korea, Japan and China. The old miracles are helping to build the new one.................. Average annual per capita income in Vietnam has quintupled since the late 1980s to nearly $3,000 per person, but the cost of labor is still one half that of China, and the work force is unusually well educated for its income class. That skilled labor is helping Vietnam move “up the ladder,” perhaps faster than any rival, to manufacture increasingly sophisticated goods. Tech surpassed clothing and textiles as Vietnam’s leading export in 2015, and accounts for most of its record trade surplus this year. ................. Vietnam is also a trend-bending, Communist champion of open borders, a signatory to more than a dozen free trade agreements ........... is making autocratic capitalism work unusually well, through open economic policies and sound financial management. ........... Vietnam has sustained strong growth so far, largely free of the classic excesses, like large government deficits or public debts.
If Amy Coney Barrett Were Muslim It’s not hard to imagine how conservatives would smear her religious beliefs. ........... I’m a practicing Muslim living through an administration that campaigned for a Muslim ban. My community has endured two decades of hazing after the Sept. 11 attacks, and our loyalty is still deemed suspect. I would never wish that kind of judgment on a person of another faith.
Mitch McConnell’s Mission of Misery Why Senate Republicans won’t help Americans in need. ........ I keep seeing news reports saying that the Trump administration is “pivoting” on economic stimulus. But Donald Trump has been reversing positions so frequently that it looks less like a series of pivots than like a tailspin. ............. the best guess is that for the next three-plus months — that is, until President Joe Biden takes office (highly likely, though not certain) with a Democratic Senate (more likely than not, but definitely not a sure thing) — there will be little or no aid for the millions of families, thousands of businesses and many state and local governments on the brink of disaster. .............. most Senate Republicans .... They’re willing to cover for Trump’s unprecedented corruption; they’re apparently unbothered by his fondness for foreign dictators. But spending money to help Americans in distress? That’s where they draw the line. ............. Lindsey Graham declared that emergency unemployment benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies” (actually 215,000 other people’s dead bodies, but who’s counting?). ............ And McConnell — whose state benefits from far more federal spending than it pays in taxes — derided proposed aid to states as a “blue state bailout.” ......... it’s hard to think of any major G.O.P.-approved fiscal legislation in the past two decades that didn’t redistribute income upward. ............. And that’s why Republicans are unwilling to provide desperately needed aid to economic victims of the pandemic. They aren’t worried that a relief package would fail; they’re worried that it might succeed, showing that sometimes more government spending is a good thing. Indeed, a successful relief package might pave the way for Democratic proposals that would, among other things, drastically reduce child poverty.
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