Over the past decade, rising labor costs in China meant that its days as the factory of the world were numbered. Stable Vietnam, with its young, cheap workforce and serviceable infrastructure, seemed like the logical next choice. Foreign investment poured in throughout the mid-2000s, with net inflows more than tripling to $9.6 billion in 2008 from two years earlier. Vietnam was the "next Asian tiger in the making," said Goldman Sachs. "Foreign investors didn't care about governance or policy. They were driven by low labor costs," says Edmund Malesky, a political economist at the University of California at San Diego who focuses on Vietnam.
Ignoring the politics, it turned out, was a costly oversight. Few businesspeople predicted the Vietnam of 2012: a country struggling with a weak currency, inflation, red tape, and cronyism that has led to billions of dollars of waste -- and home to a government that makes decisions like building oddly placed ports or roads that serve little economic value.
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