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Vietnam Direction and Composition of Trade
Trading patterns from 1978 through 1986 reflected the growing
importance of Vietnam's relationship with Comecon and its
weakening ties with major Western economies and noncommunist
regional trading partners. Total trade with non-Comecon countries
peaked at a little more than US$1 billion in 1978, dropped to
less than US$700 million in 1982 and 1983, then averaged some
US$850 million per year through 1986 (all dollar figures are
given in terms of 1987 conversion rates). Two-way trade with the
Soviet Union, that totaled about US$550 million in 1977, reached
US$1.2 billion in 1981. This trade, which averaged some 43
percent of total trade from 1977 through 1980, accounted for
about 64 percent of the total during the period of the Third
Five-Year Plan. According to export plans announced by the Sixth
National Party Congress in December 1986, two-way trade with the
Soviet Union would continue to account for the major share of the
country's foreign trade under the Fourth Five-Year Plan (see
table 11, Appendix A).
In the 1980s, Vietnam's trade deficits with non-Comecon
countries declined as the country's deficit with the Soviet Union
grew. In 1977 and for several years thereafter, Vietnamese
exports to its non-communist trade partners averaged less than 20
percent of the value of its imports from them. Exports to these
countries increased slowly throughout the mid-1980s as imports
declined. Most of the improvement resulted from substantive
reductions in imports from eight major trading partners: Canada,
Australia, France, Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany (West
Germany), Sweden, Britain, and India. The reduction in imports
resulted as much from Vietnamese self restraint and loss of trade
credit as from politically motivated boycotts on trade with
Vietnam, such as that observed by a number of Western and Asian
Nations including the United States and the member nations of
ASEAN. Vietnam's exports to several Western countries, including
West Germany and Britain, increased, however, and the Vietnamese
occasionally showed small positive trade balances with Australia
and Canada in the mid-1980s. By 1986 Vietnam had reduced its
balance-of-payments deficit with non-Comecon countries to less
than US$300 million (compared with more than US$700 million
annually in the late 1970s) and was exporting products worth half
the value of its import bill. Trade with the Soviet Union,
however, followed the opposite pattern. Vietnamese exports were
valued at an average of 49 percent of imports from the Soviet
Union in 1977 and 1978, but at less than 25 percent of imports
from 1981 through 1986.
Data as of December 1987
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