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Edmund Malesky Quoted in Bloomberg News

Vietnam to Consider Policy Measures After Downgrade

12/21/2010
Bloomberg News

Vietnam’s policy makers will meet this week to consider economic measures after Moody’s Investors Service cut the country’s credit rating, said a senior government official who will be at the discussions.

Moody’s decision prompted calls from investors and economists for Vietnam to take action and counter economic risks, said the official, who declined to be identified as he isn’t authorized to speak about the meetings. The discussions will be held in Hanoi, he said.

The agency cut Vietnam’s rating to four levels below investment grade on Dec. 15, citing the risk of a balance-of- payments crisis and a drop in foreign reserves. Any immediate policy change as a result of this week’s meetings would be unusual as it would come ahead of January’s National Party Congress, held every five years, analysts said.

“You don’t see big policies passed at this time,” Edmund Malesky, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Center on Pacific Economies at the University of California, San Diego, said in an interview in Hanoi last week. That’s because people are waiting for “for new leadership and new directives”, he said.

The ruling Communist Party is scheduled to determine the country’s top leadership and a broad socioeconomic plan at the 11th National Party Congress next month.

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Edmund Malesky is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Center on Pacific Economies (CPE). Before joining IR/PS in 2005, Malesky was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Weatherhead Center of International Affairs. His doctoral thesis discusses the politics of economic reform in Vietnam demonstrating how a coalition of provincial officials and foreign investors induced far-reaching economic reforms by the Vietnamese central government. The dissertation won the Gabriel Almond award of the American Political Science Association, honoring the best thesis in the field of comparative politics. In addition to his academic research, he has been a consultant for the Asia Foundation, USAID, World Bank, and the United Nations Development Program.

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