The Roles of Government in Economic Development: Some Analysis from Paradigm Shift Perspective

Abstract

Looking through the historical researches, there are hundreds of study that defined different roles of government, its functions or even debates on what is more important – the market or the government...with various point of view. However, governments do play a crucial role in the development process of every nation around the world – it’s an undeniable fact. Pick out one country, and we can easily see the remarks of what their government did in different aspects such as economy, socio – culture, or diploma. The Vietnamese government is not out of this, with many achivements traced back to the day of the country’s official independence. In 38 years from 1975, the role of the government has been changing significantly, being affected by both international and domestic environments under difficult circumstances. This paper is aiming to point out some of the characteristics of the changing role of the government in this 38 years, devided into three different periods (the period of 1975 – 1985: time of recovering after wars; the period of 1986 – 2006: time of Doi Moi; and the period of 2007 – 2013: time of restructuring the economy), in terms of economic development. Using the paradigm shift approach, we call each period a paradigm, and try to apply the policy analysis perspective to each paradigm to understand and analyze the change in economic development via public policies. Since public policies are key tool of governing, economic developing can be consider the display for the role of the government.

Keywords: Economic development, role of government, paradigm shift.