Through an analysis of aggregate data and 40 interviews with senior politicians, government officials, and state-owned enterprise managers in Vietnam, this paper illustrates these insights by analyzing the political economy of SOE reform backsliding on the eve of Vietnam’s accession to the WTO. | World Trade Review (2017), 16: 1, 85–109 © Tu-Anh Vu-thanh doi: First published online 20 October 2016 Does WTO Accession Help Domestic Reform? The Political Economy of SOE Reform Backsliding in Vietnam TU-ANH VU-THANH* Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, Vietnam Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that international trade agreements can serve as a source of external pressure and credible commitment to overcome opposition and to lock in domestic economic reforms. This belief, however, underestimates the ability of politicians not only to circumvent these pressures, but to leverage international trade agreements to advance their own policy preferences – preferences that may be highly anti-reformist. Thus, trade agreements do not necessarily induce reforms and, in certain circumstances, they can even be counterproductive. Through an analysis of aggregate data and 40 interviews with senior politicians, government officials, and state-owned enterprise managers in Vietnam, this paper illustrates these insights by analyzing the political economy of SOE reform backsliding on the eve of Vietnam’s accession to the WTO. 1. Introduction Current literature suggests that WTO accession, and more generally international economic agreements, can serve as a source of external pressure and credible commitment to overcome opposition and to lock in domestic economic reforms (., Staiger and Tabellini, 1999; Davis, 2006; Basu, 2008; Lamy, 2012; Aaronson and Abouharb, 2014; Zoellick, 2014).1 However, the effects of WTO accession on domestic economic reforms have been heterogeneous, even among seemingly * Email: anhvt@ The author would like to thank Trần D̵ ức Nguyên, Phạm Chi Lan, Robert Keohane, Ngaire Woods, and Laura Chirot for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. The author is also grateful for feedback received from presentations of the paper at University of Oxford, University of Warwick, Princeton University, and .
