Vietnam's open window

For about two decades Vietnam has had the wind at its back: a young workforce, falling fertility, factories moving in from China, and a stock market that swings like a teenager. This is a long look at the numbers behind that, and what happens when the window starts to close.

The numbers, up front

Growth, decade by decade

Real GDP growth has averaged around 6.4% since 2010, with one violent dip (the 2020-2021 pandemic) and one violent rebound (8% in 2022):

The market’s mood

The VN-Index does not move like the economy. It moves like sentiment, a 16% drop in 2022, a 31% recovery in 2023:

Where the people are

Two cities hold roughly a fifth of the population and half the output. The table paginates, sorts, and filters; hover a row or a column:

The shape of a population

The dependency ratio, the people a worker supports, is still low:

$\text{dependency ratio} = \frac{\text{under 15} + \text{65 and over}}{\text{15 to 64}} = \frac{24 + 7.6}{68.4} \approx 46\%$

The window

The dividend is not permanent. Fertility has already fallen below replacement (1.91), so the working-age bulge is on a clock:

Vietnam among its neighbors

Vietnam is the cheap, young, fast one of the ASEAN-5, richer countries are older and smaller:

What people say about getting rich

Multiple tweets, aligned in a grid:

Naval @naval

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

May 31, 2018 on X

Naval @naval

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

May 31, 2018 on X

The same real tweet is shown twice only to demonstrate the aligned grid; X’s API publicly serves just this one test tweet.

What I would watch

• The window’s clock. The dividend closes around 2040. The question is whether productivity and incomes rise fast enough before the dependency ratio does. Most countries miss this.
• Two cities, one country. Half the output sits in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Either the regions catch up, or Vietnam inherits the Bangkok problem of a capital that ate everything.
• A shallow market. A stock market that drops 16% and rises 31% in consecutive years is not pricing fundamentals; it is pricing mood. Depth comes from governance, which lags.

What I know now is that a demographic window is a gift you can waste. Vietnam’s is open, wide, and quietly closing. The interesting decade is this one.

Wu · Da Nang · May 2026

Scaffold sample: the long-form data essay, exercising the whole kit. Figures, metrics, charts, a paginated table, KaTeX, an interactive flow diagram, a comparison table, a scatter, aligned tweets, and bulleted paragraphs. Data is illustrative and sourced where noted.