What this research found
How exposed is Vietnam to a shock in global trade, and to which counterparties? K-Dense traced Vietnam's trade openness, current-account balance, and external debt from 2010 to 2022, then measured how concentrated its 2022 exports were by destination and by product. Trade in goods and services grew from 113.98% of GDP to 183.15%, and the central finding is a dual asymmetry: the United States buys 29.5% of Vietnam's merchandise exports while China supplies 32.8% of its imports, placing the country's revenue and its inputs on opposite sides of a geopolitical rivalry.
- Trade openness rose from 113.98% of GDP in 2010 to 183.15% in 2022, peaking at 186.68% in 2021 — an increase of roughly 69 percentage points. Above 180%, a contraction in either exports or imports passes into GDP with little domestic buffer.
- The United States absorbed 29.51% of merchandise exports in 2022, worth 109.5 billion US dollars, nearly twice second-placed China at 15.55%. The top five destinations together took 61.08%.
- Partner concentration and product concentration point in different directions. Across 97 reported partners the export Herfindahl-Hirschman Index was 1,259.7, below the 1,500 unconcentrated threshold, but the product index was 1,634.0, in the moderately concentrated band.
- One product family dominates: electrical machinery and electronics accounted for 37.84% of exports, or 140.3 billion US dollars, far ahead of machinery at 7.95% and footwear at 6.62%.
- China supplied 117.7 billion US dollars of imports, 32.8% of the total and the largest single source. Because Vietnam's electronics, footwear, and apparel exports depend on imported components and machinery, Chinese inputs sit upstream of the goods Vietnam sells to the United States.
- The external accounts are thin rather than strong. The current account averaged a 1.36% of GDP surplus but with a 2.54 percentage-point standard deviation, turning negative in four of the thirteen years, while external debt climbed from 31.56% of gross national income to a 41.57% peak in 2017 before easing to 37.26%.
How it was done
Annual macroeconomic trajectories for 2010 to 2022 were pulled from the World Bank's World Development Indicators through the Data360 interface, covering trade as a share of GDP, the current-account balance, and external debt stocks. Bilateral and product-level trade for the 2022 reference year came from UN Comtrade at the two-digit Harmonized System chapter level, with exports valued free on board and imports at cost including insurance and freight. Concentration was quantified with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index read against the standard antitrust bands and with the top-five concentration ratio, and the partner index was recomputed after excluding unspecified residual categories to check that the diversified reading held. The result is a backward-looking risk narrative rather than a forecast.
Data sources
- World Bank World Development Indicators — trade as % of GDP, current account as % of GDP, external debt as % of GNI, annual 2010–2022, accessed 2026-07-10
- UN Comtrade — Vietnam merchandise exports by partner and by HS 2-digit chapter, 2022 (reporter 704, HS revision H6)
- UN Comtrade — Vietnam merchandise imports by partner, 2022
- US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission — Herfindahl-Hirschman Index concentration thresholds
- World Customs Organization — Harmonized System 2-digit chapter nomenclature
Limitations
The assessment is explicitly backward-looking and makes no forecast, and the concentration figures rest on a single reference year rather than a trend. None of the individual indicators breaches a recognized crisis threshold; the argued risk lies in their combination, and the concentration analysis covers merchandise trade only.
How this research was produced
K-Dense Web planned and ran this economics investigation end to end — gathering the sources, carrying out the analysis, producing the figures, and drafting the report. The full session transcript, including every intermediate step, is available to view.
