The Cultural Dimensions of the Vietnamese Private Entrepreneurship

The Cultural Dimensions of the Vietnamese Private Entrepreneurship
Vuong Quan Hoang* and Tran Tri Dung**

This paper examines the influence of cultural and socioeconomic factors on the growth of enterpreneurship in Vietnam. Traditional cultural values continue to have a strong impact on the Vietnamese society, and to a large extent adversely affect the entrepreneurial spirit of the community. Typical constraints private entrepreneurs face may have roots in the cultural facet as legacy of the Confucian society like relationship-based bank credit. Low quality business education is both a victim and culprit of the long-standing tradition that looks down on the role of private entrepreneurship in the country.

Introduction
This paper explores the cultural impacts on the private entrepreneurship in the post-Doi Moi Vietnam.1 Some important aspects of the traditional cultural values of the Vietnamese society are explored along with the socioeconomic changes over the past two decades. In the academic circle across the world, entrepreneurship has enjoyed a voluminous literature contributed by many scholars in economics, sociology, anthropology, business management and political sciences, since the mid-20th century. The research line of entrepreneurship has received huge attention from the economists’ community across the world, especially after the seminal work in 1934, by Joseph Schumpeter’s The Theory of Economic Development. In his study, Schumpeter placed entrepreneurship in a major theoretical framework to track the progress of human society and economic growth. Since the study of Schumpeter, there has been a major shift in the perception of economists. Entrepreneurs could now be considered a crucial factor in contributing to the economic
* Professor of Financial Economics, Department of Finance, Center Emile Bernheim, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (SBS-EM), ULB CP 145/01 50, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 1050 Brussels, Belgium; and is the

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