SBTN / Bloomberg
T2, 09/08/2014 - 08:07
Trong một bài viết nghiên cứu về kinh tế đời sống
của Việt Nam sau gần 40 năm không chia cắt địa lý chính trị, tờ Bloomberg đã có
bài nhận định sâu sắc, nhấn mạnh rằng Sài Gòn vẫn là trung tâm của phát triển
và vượt Hà Nội mọi mặt, dù bị cưỡng chiếm, tận thu và bị o ép nhiều mặt.
Trong bài viết có tên Saigon
Beats Hanoi Four Decades After Vietnam War ra ngày 3 tháng 9, tờ Bloomberg
đã gây nhiều chý ý trong giới nghiên cứu về tình hình Việt Nam, đồng thời cũng
làm cho hệ thống kiểm duyệt của Nhà nước CSVN khó chịu, vội vã tìm cách ngăn
chận.
Theo nhận định của nhà phân tích Jason Folkmanis,
thì hiện nay, dù được dành cho nhiều ưu thế về ngân sách, thậm chí là nuông
chiều, nhưng Hà Nội vẫn tụt hậu so với Sài Gòn về đầu tư và phát triển. Một
thành phố trước đây là thủ đô của miền Nam tự do, dù có một thời gian ngắn ngủi
vươn ra thế giới trong tình cảnh chiến tranh, nhưng lại đủ sức khôn ngoan để
xoay sở và sống còn trong ách tận thu của chế độ CSVN.
Hiện nay, Sài Gòn đang là thành phố chiếm một phần
tư cả tổng sản phẩm nội địa, thậm chí sức phát triển kinh tế vượt gấp 7 lần so
với thủ đô Hà Nội.
Ông
Edmund Malesky, giáo sư về kinh tế chính trị của Duke University,
tại Durham, North Carolina, cho biết rằng nếu phân tích chiều sâu, Sài Gòn đang
có rất nhiều ưu thế của một nền hoạt động kinh tế hết sức chi tiết tinh tế,
cũng như sự vững chắc của hàng loạt các công ty địa phương so với Hà Nội.
Sự thành công vượt trội của Sài Gòn, mà ai cũng biết
là bị chế độ CSVN giày xéo như một đội quân chiếm đóng, đã khiến người Sài Gòn
hết sức tự hào về thành phố của mình. Sau tháng 4 năm 1975, những người Cộng
sản đã đặt lại tên của thành phố này là Hồ Chí Minh, theo lãnh tụ của Đảng
CSVN, nhưng người Sài Gòn đã âm thầm từ chối cái tên đó bằng cách vẫn gọi tên
nguyên gốc của nó là Sài Gòn, đến mức chính quyền cưỡng chiếm CSVN cũng đành
phải miễn cưỡng chấp nhận.
Sài Gòn hiện nay đang có số dân cư ngụ chính thức là
7.8 triệu người, nhưng số người nhập cư để kiếm sống có thể khiến thành phố này
có khoảng 10 triệu người ở đây. Mức thu nhập đầu người ở Sài Gòn hiện nay cũng
cao hơn ở Hà Nội. Hiện có 6.9 triệu dân trong thành phố, Hà Nội chỉ có thu nhập
trung bình đầu người hàng năm là 2.985 Mỹ kim do với Sài Gòn là 4.513 Mỹ kim
mỗi người, hàng năm.
Dù vậy, cho tới giờ phút này, Sài Gòn vẫn đang bị
tận thu đến mức khó tin cho ngân sách Nhà nước cũng như lọt vào túi riêng của
hệ thống quan chức CSVN. (N. Khanh)
--------------------
By Jason
Folkmanis and Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen
Sep 3, 2014 6:01 PM ET
Almost four decades after the Vietnam War ended, Saigon
has turned the tables on Hanoi, outstripping its conqueror in investment and
growth.
The former southern capital, renamed Ho Chi Minh
City but still widely known by its prewar name, contributes almost a quarter of
the country’s gross domestic product and the market capitalization of its stock index
is seven times Hanoi’s. (VHINDEX) Now, Saigon is upping the ante with
plans to build a new airport that would increase capacity as much as fivefold.
“By all measures, Ho Chi Minh City has moved into a
more advanced place than Hanoi in terms of the sophistication of its economy
and local companies,” said Edmund Malesky, an associate professor of political
economy at Duke
University in Durham, North
Carolina, and the lead researcher for the Vietnam Provincial
Competitiveness Index, compiled by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and
Industry with U.S. aid.
It’s a long way from the chaotic day of April 30,
1975, when North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential
palace. Replicas are now parked outside as a tourist attraction, while the
renamed Reunification Palace is a favored venue for shareholder meetings.
Saigon’s population has more than doubled to 7.8
million, while its economy grew 9.3 percent last year, pushing the city’s
per-capita GDP to $4,513, more than twice the national average. In Hanoi, which
has about 6.9 million residents, the economy grew 8.3 percent to increase its
per-capita to $2,985.
Economic
Hub
That makes the southern city key to Vietnam’s
efforts to revive a national economy heading for its seventh straight year of
sub-7 percent growth after averaging 7.3 percent in the previous seven
years.
Ho Chi Minh City’s
relative wealth makes it the entry point for many Western brands. McDonald’s Corp.
(MCD) Chief Executive Officer Donald Thompson attended the opening of the
company’s first branch in the country in February. A second opened in May near
Ben Thanh market, a landmark where tourists slurp bowls of spicy beef noodles
and shop for lacquer boxes and raw silk.
Hanoi got its first Starbucks Corp. store in July --
more than a year behind Ho Chi Minh City, which now has eight.
“Saigon is the dynamo, the city with more energy,”
said Ray Burghardt, the Hanoi-based U.S. ambassador to Vietnam from 2001 to 2004,
who lived in South Vietnam from 1970 to 1973.
Looking
South
Part of that dynamism is rooted in the city’s past.
Southern Vietnam’s trading roots date back centuries, according to Martin
Stuart-Fox, an emeritus history professor at Australia’s University of
Queensland in Brisbane. While Hanoi’s history is tied to the presence of
neighboring China, about 100
miles away, Saigon, next to the rich alluvial plain of the Mekong Delta, is 700
miles to the south and closer to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore than it is to the
Chinese border.
“Southern Vietnam was always a frontier area, and
because it didn’t have that close contact with China and didn’t look north as
Hanoi always had, people in the south looked outward instead and welcomed
trade,” said Stuart-Fox. “Then, when the French moved in, they built drainage
canals to increase rice production in the Mekong Delta and boost trade with France, and in general focused
on exploiting the south economically.”
Vietnam’s post-1975 attempts to stifle enterprise
misfired “abysmally” in Ho Chi Minh City, with many entrepreneurs sent to labor
camps for “capitalist activities,” until a crumbling economy caused Marxist
tenets to be diluted or scrapped, Stanley Karnow wrote in his book “Vietnam: a
History.” After the so-called Doi Moi economic reforms in 1986, Saigon resumed
its role as a commercial hub, with newly freed entrepreneurs quickly resuming
their businesses.
Western
Influence
Growth was boosted in 2000 with the signing of a
bilateral trade agreement with the U.S.
“The south has always had more U.S. influence on its
business culture,” said Than Trong Phuc, managing director of
technology-focused investment fund DFJ VinaCapital LP in Ho Chi Minh City.
“Doing business here is more straightforward, whereas doing business in the
north involves more government and a complex maze of relations.”
Saigon’s economy even may have benefited from being
on the losing side of the war because it removed much of the government
presence that existed when it was the southern capital, said Sesto Vecchi,
managing partner of the Ho Chi Minh City office of U.S. law firm Russin &
Vecchi. He arrived in South Vietnam
in 1965 with the U.S. Navy and was in Saigon in the days before it fell.
Less
Government
“Now there’s even less government impact on people’s
decision making here,” said Vecchi, who returned to live in the city in 1993.
“A lot of the government influence in those days was directed toward the war,
but even with that, Saigon always had a strong commercial environment.” Hanoi’s
position as the nation’s capital is a double-edged sword. While it makes the
city vital for businesses that must deal with the ministries, especially banks,
it also creates a more restrictive regulatory environment.
“We need to see more progress in terms of the
economic-reform policies coming out of Hanoi,” Burghardt said. “Ho Chi Minh
City is a hostage to the speed of those reforms.”
Ho Chi Minh City ranked 10th last year and Hanoi
33rd among 63 Vietnamese provinces and cities in the country’s competitiveness
gauge, which weighs measures such as entry cost, transparency and access to
land.
Downtown
Airport
Ho Chi Minh City’s advance is most evident at the
airport, which saw some of the fiercest fighting during the battle for the city
in 1975. A 20-minute drive from Reunification Palace, Tan Son Nhat
is now in the heart of Saigon’s expanding sprawl of houses, shops and
factories. Still coded SGN for Saigon, it’s almost at bursting point, with
almost twice the number of passengers that fly in and out of Hanoi.
The planned new airport in neighboring Dong Nai
province eventually is expected to handle 100 million passengers a year,
compared with about 20 million at Tan Son Nhat. The project needs approval from
the National Assembly and its first stage, costing about $7.8 billion, wouldn’t
be operational until at least 2020.
Meantime, the number of travelers coming to Vietnam
keeps rising, climbing 11 percent last year to 7.6 million. Tourists heading to
Hanoi are drawn to the scenic limestone islands of Ha Long Bay;
in the south, it’s the beach resorts of Mui Ne and Phu Quoc island or the
former emperor Bao Dai’s summer palace in the hills in Dalat.
The latest offering is a resort and
casino at Ho Tram beach, with courtesy buses shuttling gamesters for the 2
1/2-hour drive to and from Saigon.
“The beaches in the north can only be used for half
the year; the southern beaches are beautiful, and they are usable year-round,”
said Paul Stoll, who helped set up the Vietnam Tourism Association and is chief
executive of Celadon International Hotel Management Joint-Stock Co. “Ho Chi
Minh City is Vietnam’s superhub.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Jason
Folkmanis in Ho Chi Minh City at folkmanis@bloomberg.net; Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen in Hanoi
at uyen1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Adam Majendie at adammajendie@bloomberg.net
James Hertling
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