The world-scale expansion of markets and market relations ranks among the most transformative developments of our times. We can refer to this process by way of a generic if inelegant term - marketization. This book explores how processes of marketization have registered across East Asia's diverse social landscape and its implications for patterns of welfare and inequality. While there has been great interest in East Asia's economic rise, treatments of welfare and inequality in the region have been largely relegated to specialist literatures. Proceeding from a synthetic critique of political economy, this book places welfare and inequality at the center of a more encompassing comparative approach to political economy that construes countries as dynamic, globally embedded social orders defined and animated by distinctive social relational and institutional features.

International set of contributors Cutting edge and up to date research Comprehensive coverage of Vietnamese politics, economics and society

Vietnam is a country on the move. Yet contemporary Vietnam's education system is at a crossroads. Rapid economic growth has permitted rapid increases in the scale and scope of formal schooling, but there is a prevailing sense that the current education system is inadequate to the country's needs. Sunny assessments of Vietnam's ""achievements"" in the sphere of education have given way to a realization that the country lacks skilled workers. Some have even spoken of an ""education crisis"". These are not abstract concerns. What is occurring in Vietnam's education system today has broad implications for the country's social, political, economic, and cultural development. Featuring contributions from scholars and policy analysts from within and outside Vietnam, Education in Vietnam addresses key issues pertaining to the political economy of education, the provision and payment for primary and secondary education, and the development of vocational and tertiary education. The book marks an important contribution to existing understandings of Vietnam's education system and contributes to broader understandings of social conditions and change in contemporary Vietnam.