Context            

Considerable economic and technological progress and advances in productive capacity have brought about formidable improvements in the quality of life. But inequity remains and indeed, over the last ten years, with the implementation of ever more liberal policies, has worsened. In a liberal context of national reconstruction, social policy is the poor cousin, lagging behind the imperatives of globalisation, competition and membership of the worldwide market.
 

The government has been aiming to build a competitive Vietnam while trying to preserve a certain level of social cohesion, but when the economic is allowed to prevail over the social, these aims are systematically undermined.

A place has to be found for the cooperative model as an alternative form of entrepreneurship within this context. Numerous international bodies have cited the virtues of the cooperative model, but in Vietnam, notwithstanding the advances brought in under the 2003 law and numerous sectorial adjustments, the future of the cooperative sector depends upon the various protagonists working together to define and deliver a real normative framework. Substantial efforts are still needed to this end.
 

The cooperative movement in Vietnam, while tending to stagnate in certain areas of activity, remains a force for economic development. It is a form of organisation capable of easing tension on several levels, helping to regulate some of the relations between the “social” and the “capital” and the fall-out arising from them.