Digital Economy in Vietnam: An Overview, Developmental Potential, and Policy Implications

Abstract

The digital economy has been developing rapidly and playing an important role in the economies of other countries as well as in Vietnam during the transition period from the digital revolution to the fourth industrial revolution thanks to the emergence of new digital technologies and digitalization. Digital economic sectors are formed by applying of digital technologies integrated with business models. Digital technology capabilities integrated with business models allow assessment development of the digital economy. According to this approach, an overview of the article examines the current situation, trend, potentails and solutions of the development of Vietnam’s digital economy which is based on the classification of the digital economy’s concepts according to scopes: the core digital economy, the narrow digital economy and the broad digital economy. This classification shows the role and interactions between information technology industry components, Industry 4.0 technology components and economic models in the scopes of the digital economy. The trend of the development of the digital economy come from the development of digital technologies, characteristics of assessing the potential of the digital economy and some methods of measuring the value of the digital economy to evaluate the potential of Vietnam digital economy. Research results show that up to now, the digital economy in Vietnam has mainly thrived thanks to the development of the information technology industy (ICT) and e-commerce fields. However besides ICT and e-commerce, the potential for developing of the digital economy in Viet nam will still be huge thanks to the development of the broad economy and the results of the digital transformation process in Vietnam.