Management

Located in Southeast Asia, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is bordered to the north by the People’s Republic of China, to the west by Laos and Cambodia, and to the east and south by the South China Sea. The country is a mere 127,000 square miles but has a population of almost 86.2 million. The lan-guage is Vietnamese, and the principal religion Buddhism, although there are a number of small minorities, including Confucian, Christian (mainly Catholic), Caodist, Daoist, and Hoa Hao. In recent years, the country’s economy has been up and down, but average annual per capita income still is in the hundreds of dollars as the peasants remain very poor. One of the reasons that Vietnam has lagged behind its fast-developing neighbors in Southeast Asia, such as Thailand and Malaysia, is its isolation from the industrial West, and the United States in particular, because of the Vietnam War. From the mid-1970s, the country had close relations with the U.S.S.R., but the collapse of commu-nism there forced the still-communist Vietnamese govern-ment to work on establishing stronger economic ties with other countries. The nation recently has worked out many of its problems with China, and today, the Chinese have become a useful economic ally. And Vietnam is well on its way in establishing a vigorous trading relationship with the United States. Efforts toward this end began over a decade ago, but because of lack of information concerning the many U.S. soldiers still unaccounted for after the war, it was not until 1993 that the United States permitted U.S. companies to take part in ventures in Vietnam that were financed by international aid agencies. Then, in 1994, the U.S. trade embargo was lifted, and a growing number of American firms began doing business in Vietnam. Caterpillar began supplying equipment for a $2 billion highway project. Mobil teamed with three Japanese part-ners to begin drilling offshore. Exxon, Amoco, Conoco, Unocal, and Arco negotiated...