Understanding the degree and evolution of competition across industries is
an important step towards understanding the impact of economic reform and
competition on economic growth in Vietnam during the economic transition. In this
paper, the author investigates the evolution of competition in Vietnam during the
economic transition using the price-cost margin (PCM) or mark-up that has been
widely applied in the economic literature and the profit elasticity (PE) recently
developed by Boone in his paper Competition (2000). This paper provides the first
empirical study of intensity and evolution of competition across selected industries in
Vietnam in the last decade using firm-level data from the Vietnam Enterprise Census
(VEC) conducted annually since 2000 by the Vietnam General Statistical Office
(GSO).