IDEAS Insights Vietnam's emergent social enterprise sector | Page 6

Fig. 2: A member of the H’Mong ethnic minority group works in Yen Bai Province, Northern Vietnam
Vietnam could look towards the example of Thailand, which has given pioneering
support to social enterprise since amending its Constitution in 1997, to encourage civil
society to support social initiatives. Thailand subsequently put into law ‘The Regulation
of the National Promotion of Social Enterprises’, and set up the ‘Thailand Social
Enterprise Office’ (TSEO) in 2010 with a $3.5 million budget, which is tasked with
implementing a five-year Master Plan for Social Enterprises. This has been
complemented by Finance Ministry measures to reduce taxes in March 2016. Under
new Finance Ministry legislation, SEs ‘would be completely exempt from corporate tax
if they allocated at least 70 percent of their net profit to social work’. [19] By the same
token, investors in such companies can ‘deduct the cost in full from their corporate
income tax’.
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