Vietnam’s Participation in the Global Value Chains: Opportunities and Challenges

Participating in the Global value chains (GVCs) has played an important role to Vietnam economy, help expanding export, boosting growth, reducing unemployment and poverty rate. However, the world production and trade are changing rapidly, especially with the Industrial revolution 4.0. Under this revolution, Global value chains will have significant changes that influence the world production specialization in different ways. For Vietnam, the world technology development will bring chance to improve production and trading capacity, especially through FDI channel. However, there also be challenges to Vietnam’s relative advantage, competitiveness and then Vietnam’s participation in GVCs. This paper analyses major changes of GVCs under the industrial revolution 4.0 impact. From the changes of the future production and specialized in the global supply chains, the paper analyses opportunities and challenges in GVC’s participation of Vietnam. The challenges will have derived from the gap in production capacity and labour skill in Vietnam and developing countries. Therefore, to take the opportunities and overcome challenges, Vietnam need a reform in production and education system to reduce the gap and catch up the world’s production.