Viet Nam has made a remarkable transition since 1989 from a centrally planned economy dominated by the administrative allocation of resources to an economy largely governed by market forces. It has accomplished this transition while avoiding the sharp fall in GDP and industrial output that occurred in many other centrally planned economies in Central and Eastern Europe. Much of the success in industrial development to date has been the result of government decisions to remove barriers to entrepreneurial efforts for both foreign direct investors and more recently for domestic private investors.