Impacts of start-ups and SMEs on the nature of work and employment in Vietnam: perspectives from evolutionary economics

Abstract

Never has the trend of start-ups and small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) risen so rapidly in Vietnam. In this context, these new business entities alter thoroughly the nature of work and employment in the economy. The impacts can be studied using evolutionary economics because the mainstream, traditional thoughts have failed to incorporate institutional and social factors into analysis. While traditional schools of thoughts view the main economic figure to be individual who is tasked with making decisions at a period of time under resource scarcity, recent heterodox perspectives start to adopt the fact that agents are also subject to history and complex systems of rules. It is the meso-level movements that drive evolutions in behaviours of the micro, individual rule-carriers and in the macro domain of the whole industry or economy. The continuum does not range from ‘micro-’ to ‘macro-’, but also includes ‘meso-’ in between. Using micro-meso-macro framework from the evolutionary school, the paper seeks to explain the impacts of start-ups and SMEs at micro- and macro-level by looking from the meso-perspective. In doing so, this exploratory paper also aims at laying out ideas for further research into the economic dynamics of start-ups, while adding, though little and incremental, contribution to the literature on evolutionary economics in Vietnam.