The Trajectory of Merger Regulation in Transforming Vietnam

East Asian competition regulation reflects the tension between Western- liberal capitalism and East Asian developmentalism. This tension has triggered considerable scholarly and commercial interest about the future development of competition regulation in the region. The evolution of competition regulation in Vietnam provides a valuable case study about this phenomenon. In this transforming socialist country, enduring socialist regulatory practices further complicate the development of a competition regime. This combination of potentially incompatible regulatory ideals suggests an uncertain future for competition regulation in Vietnam. It also challenges the trope that global competition law converges towards a universal template.
   This thesis investigates how regulatory tensions influence Vietnam’s competition regulation. It focuses on merger regulation – a component of competition regulation – to reveal how the party and state in Vietnam reconcile socialist, developmental and capitalist objectives.
   This thesis avoids doctrinal analysis, which omits the important underlying political and economic factors influencing competition and merger regulation. Instead it adopts an institutionalist perspective that examines how political and economic factors create the regulatory logic that shapes the evolution of merger regulation. It compares the US, Japan, China and Vietnam to demonstrate how each variety of capitalism produces its own regulatory logic. Each distinctive type of regulatory logic, it is argued, produces a distinctive type of merger regulation. This analytical approach offers some predictive power to speculate about how Vietnam’s merger regulation is likely to evolve in the future.