Although it remains a very poor country with deteriorating two-lane roads and substandard medical care, Vietnam, the Pennsylvania governor could see, had come a long way in the last decade as it tried to shed the disastrous effects of Communist central planning.
``It's changed radically,'' Ridge said of Vietnam's capital city, which he visited in 1986 as a member of Congress to urge the government to allow the children of American servicemen to leave the country. ``You didn't see cars on the road then. You didn't even see all these motor scooters - it was bicycles. I slept in mosquito nets when I was here!''
Everywhere Ridge looked in this literate and energetic nation of 80 million people, he saw opportunity.
``If I were a young man with a few dollars in my pocket and no family, I would be here,'' said the governor, who was in South Vietnam under very different circumstances in 1969 and 1970, fighting as an Army staff sergeant.
But the impression left by bustling Hanoi, where expatriate Westerners dine on sumptuous meals at bargain prices and dance at packed nightclubs, is deceiving.
Vietnam, like every Southeast Asian country, is still reeling from the 1997 Asian currency crisis, and its once-promising growth rate has stalled. The government also has been slow to reform its cumbersome and often corrupt bureaucracy, and has yet to reach a trade agreement with the United States that will allow it to export without high tariffs to the world's largest market.
The result: Foreign business executives who once converged on Vietnam are now leaving in droves.
``The economy is certainly in a tailspin,'' said Kazi Matin, chief economist at the World Bank here, the country's second-largest lender after Japan. ``[New] foreign investment has virtually disappeared.''
