Vietnam's inspirational beauty guarantees to capture the eye of first-time visitors. From the floating fruit markets on the Mekong Delta, to the brilliant green rice paddies that export an average of 3.1 million tons of rice per year, to the aquamarine waters of Halong Bay, Vietnam is cloaked in a veil of surreal natural exquisiteness.

But the beauty of the people and the landscape masks the difficulty of life for most Vietnamese. Vietnam is a poor, densely-populated country that has had to recover from the ravages of war, the loss of financial support from the old Soviet Bloc, and the rigidities of a centrally planned economy. While substantial economic progress was achieved from 1986 to 1996, the 1997 Asian financial crisis offered an opportunity for reform, but instead, reaffirmed the government's belief that shifting to a market-oriented economy would lead to disaster.