State Policy and Enterprise Readiness to Co-Invest in Urban Regeneration Projects in Vietnam

Vietnam has legislated continuously for urban regeneration since 2007 and has almost nothing to show for it. Hanoi completed nineteen reconstruction projects between 2005 and 2020, about 1.2 per cent of its 1,579 old apartment buildings, while the national stock reached 2,930 buildings by November 2025. The usual explanation is that enterprises are insufficiently willing to participate, and the usual evidence is a survey asking managers how willing they feel. This paper argues that readiness is not a disposition to be surveyed but an arithmetic outcome of the policy stock, and measures it accordingly from the public record. Two results follow. The normed profit of 10 per cent of total investment cost, fixed by regulation, yields an annualised return of 1.92 per cent over a five-year project cycle and 1.37 per cent over seven, against commercial lending rates of 8 to 10 per cent; meeting a 12 per cent hurdle over five years would require a normed profit of 76.2 per cent, seven and a half times what the regulation permits. No rational investor participates, and none has. Second, the instrument that historically made co-investment viable, the build-transfer contract settled in land, was withdrawn by the 2020 public-private partnership law and unavailable for four and a half years before being reinstated with effect from July 2025, a withdrawal that coincided exactly with the period in which the regulatory framework for regeneration was otherwise being expanded. The state added instruments while removing the one that paid for participation. At Hanoi's realised rate of 1.27 buildings a year, clearing the remaining stock would take more than twelve centuries; the 2035 target implies 173 buildings a year, an acceleration of 137 times. The paper concludes that enterprise readiness is a policy parameter rather than a behavioural variable, and identifies the three parameters that determine it.