The transition ‘from plan to market’ under a politically conservative regime in Vietnam,
where the communist party remains in power, can be seen as an example of a process in
which evolving endogenous forces drove and resourced institutional change. Two sets of
phenomena are analytically important. The first may be understood as the creation and
seeking out of economic rents in the ‘neo-classical’ sense of resources available ‘below
economic costs’; the second, more ‘classical’, concentrates upon the central importance
of ‘appropriable resources’. These two are both important because, in trying to understand
emergent capitalism after transition, they push to the fore the historical emergence of
factor markets (land, labour and capital). Social networks created during transition for
‘rent-switching’ later support advantageous access to resources created for plan
implementation andmay then, as a formof capitalismemerges, be used to access resources
in forms appropriate to market-oriented activity. It becomes clear that ‘rent-switching’
may have effects upon static economic efficiency that are positive during transition but
negative afterwards, so that the significance of ‘rents’ depends upon context.