Factor Productivity and Efficiency of the Vietnamese Economy in Transition

The purpose of this paper is to estimate changes in productivity, technical efficiency and technology across the economic sectors during the period 1985-2006. We also seek to identify the turning points for productivity growth to see whether it was accompanied by technological change and/or technical efficiency. For estimating economic growth, aggregate production function is used. We find that, during the study period, technical progress contributed about 19.7 per cent to the country’s economic growth. We also estimate total factor productivity for the whole economy as well as for individual economic sectors, and the results show that the economy’s productivity growth was largely driven by the industrial sector.