Assessing the Committed Integration of Vietnam’s Distribution Services in AEC 2015

Abstract

The free flow of trade in services is one of the important elements in realizing the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in 2015, where therewill be substantially no restriction to ASEAN service suppliers in providing services within the region. In complying with the ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services (AFAS) commitment’sschedule and AEC Blueprint’s spirit, in the next few years, Vietnam will be moving towards opening up its services market, including distribution services, to other ASEAN nations. Recently, Vietnam has witnessed a strong evolvement of distribution services. A wide range of world-leading retail groups such as Metro Cash and Carry, Big C, Parkson, Zen Plaza and Diamond Plaza have run businesses in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government has also reviewed and revised the legal framework related to distribution services to meet AFAS commitments. This paper examines Vietnam’s commitments in the distribution sector in the framework of AEC 2015 and uses an indexation method to quantify and assess the commitment level of Vietnam in the field of distribution services. The paper then compares Vietnam’s commitment level in distributionservices with that of other service sectors and with that of other ASEAN nations in the distribution sector. The paper ends by making some conclusions about the level of Vietnam’s integration in distribution services and draws out some implications to further strengthen Vietnam’s contribution in realizing the AEC’s objective for the free flow of the services trade by 2015.