Welfare refers to human well-being and to the satisfaction of basic human needs. Welfare regimes are specific institutional arrangements governing the creation and allocation of welfare. Welfare regimes analysis is a body of political economy scholarship that seeks to explain the determinants and stratification effects of welfare regimes across different historical settings. A core assumption of welfare regimes analysis is that social class — and in particular political settlements among social classes — figure centrally in the determination and stratification effects of welfare regimes. This chapter extends the concepts and theoretical methods of welfare regimes analysis to an investigation of education and educational inequalities in Vietnam under Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which has ruled in the north of the country since the 1940s and on a countrywide basis since 1975.

Welfare regimes depend on more or less stable institutional arrangements and can rise and fall. But all welfare regimes are “causally specific” to the political and economic regimes that contain them (Esping-Andersen 1987, p. 7). Over the roughly sixty years of its rule, the CPV has presided over the development of two distinctive forms of political economy and, within them, two distinctive welfare regimes. Between the 1940s and the 1980s, Vietnam experienced the development and erosion of a state-socialist political economy — first in the north and then in the south — distinguished by its democratic-centralist modes of political integration and its redistributive modes of economic integration. Since the late 1980s, Vietnam has experienced the development of a market-Leninist political economy in which democratic-centralist modes of political integration exist in combination with market economic institutions (London 2009). As I demonstrate in this chapter, under these distinctive forms of political economy, Vietnam has experienced important changes in the principles and institutions governing welfare, education, and social and educational inequalities.

The chapter is organized in three sections and advances three related arguments. The first section summarizes core concerns, concepts, and theoretical suppositions of welfare regimes analysis.