(Bloomberg) -- The announcement of the Biden administration’s decision on whether to classify Vietnam as a market economy, a step that could boost the Southeast Asian nation’s exports, has been extended by a week and will be taken by Aug. 2.
The delay on the Commerce Department ruling, previously expected to be made public by July 26, was confirmed by an agency spokesperson in an e-mailed response to questions from Bloomberg News.
The US currently classifies Vietnam as a “non-market economy,” which can be disadvantageous to Vietnamese exporters during anti-dumping petitions. The trade-reliant Southeast Asian economy has been pushing to lift its status in the US especially after Hanoi and Washington formally upgraded ties during a visit by President Joe Biden to Vietnam in September last year.
Read: Vietnam Prime Minister Asks Yellen for Better US Market Access
The Commerce spokesperson said the disruption from the CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. IT failure that affected “a small number” of anti-dumping and countervailing duty report filings led to the postponement. “The Vietnam non-market economy status case is included among these,” the spokesperson said.
Vietnam had said a market economy status in its largest export market would open up more opportunities for a nation where trade accounts for about twice the nation’s total output. The nation filed the request to the Commerce Department on Sept. 8, 2023, citing economic reforms made in recent years.
Upgrading Vietnam’s status has drawn bipartisan criticism in the US.
Senator Tom Cotton urged Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo not to grant market economy status to Vietnam, citing the country’s more than $100 billion trade surplus with the US and its government control over “prices and production through state-owned or heavily subsidized enterprises,” he said in a July 24 letter co-signed by six other Republican senators.
In January, a letter to Raimondo co-signed by eight senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, said that granting Vietnam a market economy status would “worsen ongoing trade distortions, erode the U.S. manufacturing base, threaten American workers and industries, and reinforce Vietnam’s role as a conduit for goods produced in China with forced labor.”
--With assistance from Clarissa Batino.
(Updates with bipartisan objections in last two paragraphs.)
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