In a statement on Friday, the US Department of Commerce (DOC) announced its determination that Vietnam will continue to be classified as a non-market economy country.

This means that enterprises exporting Vietnamese goods to the US market will continue to be treated differently in anti-dumping and countervailing investigations of the US and the actual production costs of Vietnamese enterprises will continue not to be recognized, instead, the "surrogate value" of a third country will be used to calculate dumping/subsidy margin in such cases.

The MoIT emphasized that if the DOC had examined the records and practices in Vietnam objectively and fairly, they would have been able to acknowledge the fact that Vietnam is already a market economy like the 72 other recognized market economies, including major economies such as the UK, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, India, the Republic Korea, and New Zealand.

Over the past 20 years, it went on, Vietnam's economy has undergone remarkable changes and development. Vietnam has successfully signed and put into practice 17 free trade agreements, including new-generation and high-standard free trade agreements with the EU, members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and the UK, with many extensive and comprehensive commitments from the reduction of duties to the raising of labour standards, environmental protection, sustainable development, government procurement, and transparency.

These changes have been clarified in more than 20,000 pages of information and documents sent by the MoIT to the DOC, demonstrating Vietnam's strong progress in all the six criteria set forth by the DOC when considering the graduation to a market economy.

The briefs provided by the MoIT for the DOC also fully and consistently demonstrate that Vietnam's level of implementation of these six criteria is at least equal to and generally better than the level of implementation by other countries that have been recognized as market economies; and in fact, equal to or better than countries that have always been considered market economies. Therefore, based on the specific statutory criteria of US law, the recognition of the market economy for Vietnam is an objective and fair reality, according to the MoIT.

The MoIT thanked 41 organizations, individuals, business associations, and trade associations in Vietnam and the US for their strong support for the graduation of Vietnam to a market economy.

The MoIT will continue to study and analyze the arguments in the DOC’s report assessing the Vietnamese economy so as to continue the supplementation and completion of the briefs and relevant dossiers to submit to the DOC to request another review to recognize the market economy status of Vietnam.