On December 21, 2009, the Government of Australia officially recognized (PDF) Vietnam as a "market economy" for purposes of administering the Australian antidumping law. In doing so, Australia joined India, the ASEAN nations, New Zealand, and several others - 23 in all - that have graduated Vietnam from non-market economy (NME) status to market economy status in national trade remedies (antidumping and countervailing duty - AD/CVD) investigations.
I'll spare you and not get into the weeds here on the difference between market economy and NME status for countries whose imports are being investigated under national trade remedies laws. (Cato's Dan Ikenson lays it all out here, if you're interested.) But here's the basic gist: AD/CVD tariffs imposed on imports from an NME country will (almost always) be higher than tariffs on the very same imports if that country were designated a market economy. Even simpler: inflated tariffs for the very same imports - just by changing the "market economy" designation.
NME designation is a vestige of the Soviet era as a way for market economies to value costs of imports from old school, command-and-control-style economies (think Romania), and only a few countries remain "NMEs," including most notably China and Vietnam (who agreed to the treatment in their WTO accession protocols). But whether to "graduate" a country from an NME to a "market economy" is completely within the discretion of the investigating country.
As noted above, 23 countries have exercised this discretion and now chosen to designate Vietnam a "market economy." Thus, they've noticed a significant change in Vietnam's economy that warrants the change, and/or they simply want to remove a significant potential market barrier to Vietnamese imports. And they're using the leeway afforded to them under their national laws and WTO rules to make that happen.
One country, however, appears to be moving in the opposite direction with Vietnam - the United States (shocking, I know).
