Marketplace - Vietnam is in its workforce golden age

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

As the U.S. population ages, our economy will rely more on nations with younger workforces. Nations like Vietnam, where there are two working-age adults for every dependent. As part of our ongoing Age of Work series, host Kai Ryssdal and ADP chief economist Nela Richardson visit a garment factory and outdoor vendor market in Ho Chi Minh City to learn more about Vietnam’s economy. But first: Companies contend with higher transportation costs and the Fed faces oil industry demand destruction.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

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From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizzol. It is Tuesday. Today, this one is the 14th of April. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Another story from our series, the age of work coming up later on in the program. but we are going to start today with the economic reality of our geopolitics. It comes in the form of the producer price index prices at the wholesale level,

which we learned this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, rose five-tenths of one percent month to month. That is the headline number. The core rate, which takes out food and energy prices because they bounce around a lot, that was basically flat. And that's going to make more sense. When I tell you that gas prices were up 14 percent in March, that's wholesale again, not pump prices. And diesel was up more than 40%, 40%. 4%.0%. Now, me mentioning diesel

should get you thinking about what diesel is used for. And if you said trucks, we'll go straight to the head of the class. Marketplace's Justin Ho is on trucks, transportation, and what the price of diesel is going to cost consumers for us today. Over the last few weeks, Catherine Reynolds, who handles imports for Palmetto Tile Distributors in South Carolina, has been getting a lot of e-mails. about fuel surcharges from shipping companies. So whatever the gross bill is, they'll add 15 to 25% to that. Reynolds says she's been through this before when energy prices spiked after Russia invaded Ukraine. But Zach Rogers, a professor at Colorado State University, says back then companies were holding on to excess inventory they built up during the pandemic.

And that helped them to rely less on transportation. This year, we've been running inventories very lean. And so even if transportation is very expensive, there will really still have to be some replenishment. Companies could build up their inventories again to avoid having to constantly replenish items. But Roger says doing so comes with its own costs, since companies still have to pay tariffs on imported goods. And so a lot of companies are finding themselves between a rock and a heart place because of these counteracting pressures of tariffs and surging fuel costs. Many companies are doing what they can to mitigate those fuel costs. Ken Gittent is CEO of Rothmans, a men's clothing store in New York.

He says he's also been getting hit with surcharges, even for local shipments. So, you know, we started investigating alternatives. And last week, we rented a truck and drove it out to the warehouse in New Jersey and picked up 22 boxes. Meanwhile, Catherine Reynolds at Palmetto Tile Distributors says she's trying to consolidate her shipments. For instance, today, she's waiting to place an order while she has two other orders on hold. Just because I want the three to ship together, if possible, to save everybody money on the back end. Still, Reynolds says she'll have to pass at least some of the costs onto her customers. I had a staff meeting this morning and just had to discuss that and tell them,

keep your eye peeled for this. We do need to build that into our cost to our client. Because the business, she says, can't afford to absorb the cost. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. What if there was a war, and six weeks into it, Wall Street and the person, if you will, of the three major indices, said, you know what, let's just call it a wash. Because that's where we find ourselves today. Equity's basically back to where they were before the bombing started. We will have the details when we do the numbers. The macroeconomic phrase over the day today was delivered by the International Energy Agency, which in a report,

Port out this morning said it's worried about a falling global demand for oil. The supply challenges we know about, the straight of her moves being closed and all. But the IAA says demand destruction is becoming a problem too. We have called Catherine Rempel to get some context on this. She's here every Friday, or Fridays every now and then, I suppose. She's on MS now and the bulwark on the regular. Catherine, welcome on a not Friday. Glad to be here. Tickin it up. Do me a favor. And And 30 seconds, demand destruction. What is it? It's kind of a funny concept.

And actually, I talked with an economist earlier today who said the idea of demand destruction offends him because demand is the relationship that tells you, you know, how many barrels people are willing to buy at any price. And the idea here is that, like, maybe a lot of people will need less oil, will purchase less oil because prices have gone up. And look, you know, if there were some magic new technology that made cars go twice as fast per gallon, I guess that would be demand destruction. What we're really talking about here is people buying less because of higher prices. To be nerdy about it, you're on a different point of the demand curve. But in this case, it's like prices got so expensive that, in fact,

people are going to, to the extent possible, purchase less oil. Okay. Why is the IEA worried about it? They are worried about it because, first of all, there may be a switch in terms of what people's buying habits are going forward. It may lead to potentially a slowdown in the U.S. economy, again, to the extent that it is possible, or U.S. economy, global economy, really, to the extent that it is possible to purchase less oil, that probably means fewer people are going to work, less stuff is getting manufactured, that there are big macroeconomic consequences, essentially, of a big decrease in oil consumption and oil demand in an analogous way, I guess I would say, to what happened during COVID when you saw a huge destruction of demand in that case because of COVID, not because

of high prices. And that led, that was indicative of and, in fact, contributed to a big slowdown economically around the world. So let's take that slowdown, possibly, around. the world and in the United States and channel your inner J. Powell or maybe Kevin Warsh, if this thing goes on long enough. And tell me what the Federal Reserve's, tell me about the rock and the hard place that the Federal Reserve will now find itself in. Well, I think the issue for the Fed is that prices are rising. Normally that implies that interest rates should go up, right? And that the point of interest rates going up is to curb demand. Like there's less money sloshing around in the economy, so people are less able to buy things. But in this case, you might see prices go up and lower

output downstream, right, because people are not buying the oil needed to manufacture stuff and transport goods and go to work, et cetera. And so if you have this serious risk of rising prices and falling output, we kind of supply shock ourselves into stagflation, which is the hardest problem for the Fed to solve. One part of the stagflation problem, the flation thing, the inflation piece, would imply that the Fed should raise interest rates. The other part of stagflation, the stag stagnation piece of things would suggest that they should cut interest rates. And either way, whatever they do they do to solve one problem will make the other problem worse. And all of this really depends on how long things drag on with the war, with the supply change,

disruptions and how expectations react, and we don't know really any of that yet. Right. That's a whole series of unknown unknowns. Last thing, and I'm going to venture into the political side of this grand thing we call the political economy, were you as surprised as I was to hear Secretary Besson today, the Secretary of the Treasury say, you know what? Maybe the Fed should just wait and see what happens. I wish I were surprised. Really? I wish I were surprised. Well, I wish I were surprised that somebody from the administration we're weighing in at all on monetary policy.

I guess that's where my starting point is. In a different administration, I would have been surprised that the Treasury Secretary would say anything about interest rates. So that's like, you know, the thing that we've become inured to that we should be shocked by, but we're not. Then the second piece of this is, yeah,

it is a little bit unexpected, I guess, that if they are going to weigh in on interest rates, which they should not, that the way that they weigh in is by saying do nothing, or they, Bessent in this case, as opposed to just cut rates as far as you can, which is what we've been hearing from Donald Trump, but also pretty much everyone else in the administration. So they are all pointing in one direction. Bessent, I guess, is maybe pushing back a little bit on that.

And we'll see where things go. I love the implied question mark on the end of that sentence. Catherine Rampel, you can get her MS now. You can get her on the bulwarks as well. Kasten, thank you. Thanks, Scott. I was in Vietnam a couple of three weeks ago for our series The Age of Work, how changing demographics are changing the way the global economy works.

I was there with Nila Richardson. She is the chief economist at ADP, our partner on this series. And you're going to hear a lot of stories from Vietnam over the next couple of days. But I'm going to start with one that really shaped our understanding of the economy over there. I'm Henry. I'm Henry Pham, Pham Quangangangang, CEO of Donie Garman Company. And what do you make here? We make garment.

Henry Fam runs a garment factory about 11 miles from downtown Ho Chi Minh City. He makes uniforms, t-shirts, hats, dresses you might buy from a big U.S. retailer. Here is a little bit hot. We move to over there. Okay. Is it cooler over there? Because it's really hot right here. Cooler, cooler.

I don't know. My phone said it was 95 degrees, so yeah, hot. We moved eventually into a room where a room where a lot. A dozen or so workers were ironing clothes and packing them up for shipping and key point here where it was air conditioning. Oh yeah, this is better. This is better. It's not as hot. I will let you know why. Last year, we feel that it's hot here. So we decided to make air conditioning for all factories. It's expensive, though. Yeah, expensive.

But it's worth it for you for a business? We need to do it because it's good for workers. Good for workers. However, it's expensive. And the money we spend for electric for every month high. Henry's plan was to air-condition the whole factory. And we finished here and everything okay. And Mr. Trump say that all products under 800 U.S. is free tech.

Yes, this person. part of the story is about tariffs. Sorry. Henry didn't pick that $800 figure out of thin air. Last August, President Trump decided he was going to impose tariffs on previously exempt shipments worth less than $800. And after that, he said, no. No, and the order down on. So you can't do air conditioning in the other part of the factory. But that's a really interesting, so you said you're worried about the United States. And that $800 thing, that diminutive, is the word we use. That's a big deal for you right here in this factory. It's a big deal. Yeah, just only a small site in U.S. and can make a lot of workers in my factory, don't have

air conditioner. Think about that. A guy who runs a garment factory in a Ho Chiman City that sends clothes all over the world is trying to grow and treat his workers better in the process. But a policy change, half a world away, means he can't afford to air-condition his factory on a 95-degree day. But for business owners like Henry FAM and others you're going to hear from, being in Vietnam comes with a whole lot of advantages. This is the most amazing marketplace that I've ever seen in my entire life. Earlier that day, before we went out to Henry Fam's factory, Nila and I had taken a little

side trip. We should say it's huge, right? And we're going to go inside in a minute. It's blocks and blocks of commerce. Right. This is the bin Thai market, right? Yes. Say it right for me.

Ben Thai. Ben Thai? Yes. Ja. Ben Thai. That's Andy. She's our translator and our fixer. Obviously, we paid her for her services. Also, you should know that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent someone to tag along to keep an eye on us and on everyone we were talking to. A free press is still not a thing in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,

even though its economy has really opened up in the past 30 years. years. There's a lot going on here. People delivering all kinds of stuff on mopeds and scooters. So many mopeds and scooters and street vendors everywhere competing for your attention. This whole series has been about prime age working population, right? We've done Cumberland County, Tennessee, we've done Utah County, Utah. We went to the UK, which is a little bit ahead of us. What has brought us here, oh, labor economist, that you are? We're seeing a country at its peak. If this was tennis, Vietnam would be the sweet spot.

This is a country where there are two working age adults for every dependent, either over 65 or under 15th. Okay. Explain why that matters. Because in every other advanced wealthy country, that golden spot led to the wealth creation. It led to economic growth. It led to technological advancement. In fact, you can't get there without having a lot. the kind of sweet spot that we're seeing in Vietnam right now.

Okay, so that's what the United States and Western Europe and developed economies had 30 years ago. That's what's been driving us for, you know, 30, 40, 50 years. So what we're seeing here is the future, right? This is what's coming for this country. Well, this is the present, I would argue. Okay. Because right now, this is the moment. This is the moment to take advantage of a working age population, an advancement in technology that is coming

and skill up a workforce to drive this economy into the future. However, it's not going to last forever. This moment for Vietnam is a moment for American companies, too, of both opportunity and challenge. Leave the way, Andy. We're off.

There was a maze of booths inside the market, literally overflowing with goods. I'm going to guess that's not a real Lubu Backpack, I'm just saying. Yes. Not real North face. Not real North Face either. That's right. Stalls, selling wallets and shoes, lotions from Korea and Japan, all kinds of food, too.

How many varieties of mushrooms are those? There are a lot. A lot of varieties. And then we turned a corner. Hello. Hello. So they're a pair of husband and wife. Yep. So this is Mr. Yom.

Hello. Let's see you. And Miss Vaughan. his wife. Ms. Vund and Mr. Young, they're married. They sell fabric from all over the world at this 10 by 10 foot booth to both wholesale buyers and retail. So the exact year, 38 years in this market selling textile. And then he started with just textile like this, fabric, just like draw material. And we should say we have bolt after bolt after bolt of fabric. Yes. And then just like recently three years in the past three years, he started selling scarf.

Scarves? This is a new product in the market, yes. All right, okay. Although it's hot here, I don't know if you need a scarf, right? Ask him how business is. So he was saying business is slow down, but he says business is slowed down, but he says it's a lot because of the technological change. People don't have to be in here to buy the product anymore.

And then he also tried to have to diversify to, that's why he started selling. It's for tourists as well. Do you think that your children would take over your business here? Their children, they are white-collar worker. They have office job, and she was describing, this walk is so much harder. She started at 7 in the morning, and then she only finished around like 6. This walk, she worked every day of the week.

Meanwhile, her children, they get more times off, and then they don't have to work like... They have vacation. Yeah, they don't have to be cruel. Crueling like her. A day at the market for her, she said, it's not stable like an office job. Vietnam's growing economy

means more opportunities for prime age workers, like the couple's children, who are able to get higher paying and, honestly, easier office jobs. That's the demographic change we're talking about, a change that does mean more opportunities for American investment and a bigger role for the Vietnamese workforce

in the global economy. We're going to go back to Henry Fam and his partially air-conditioned factory in a second. But first, let's do the numbers. Downd Ushel has picked up 317 points today. Two-thirds of 1 percent, 48,5355. The NASDAQ jumped 455 points, almost 2%. 23,639. The S&P 500 gained 81 points, 1 and 2 tenths percent, 69 and 67.

Vietnam is the top apparel supplier to these United States. overtook China back in 2025. Nike makes about 50% of its footwear and 30% of its clothes in Vietnam. Raised forward 3%. Crocs also makes about half of its iconic sandals in that Southeast Asian country. Iconic, ironic, take your pick. I don't know. Crocs stepped up 1%. Don't at me. Gap dropped 1 and a half percent today. Urban Outfitters, parent company of anthropology lost 2 and 3 tenths percent. Target up 1 and 4 tenths of 1%. The electric carmaker Rivian is going to be powering a factory in Illinois by reusing batteries from its own vehicles. So reports the Wall Street Journal. Rivian up to day, six-tenths of one percent. Bonds up two, yield on the tenure Teno down.

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All these sewing machines. Yeah, okay. Oh, wow. Remember how I said it was really, really hot? This sewing room has no air conditioning, just fans, big and small, moving that 95-degree air around. There are 50 or so workers,

each sitting at their own sewing machines. There were piles of tank tops and blouses and other partially finished pieces. So how long have you been in business? I started to do this business from 2009, when I was 24 years old. And I started with 400 U.S.D. In that time, I work for a company.

And I don't want somebody at me to do this, do that. You want it to be your own boss. He went from $400 U.S. to having more than 300 people working for him. Average age of that workforce, by the way, 35 to 40, he said. When you hire people, do they already know how to sew? and cut fabric, or do you have to train them to sew? 80% is they have good skill already, 80%, and 20% they come here and we're thinking for them. Training as workers, installing AC, that's Henry Fam investing in his people.

Vietnam's prime age workforce is a competitive advantage for companies here. And because of that, Henry has been able to expand globally with clients in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and North America. Do you ever think about how you're... I mean, here you are in the suburbs of Saigon of Ho Chi Minh City, but you're part of the global economy. Do you think about that? Did these clothes wind up in the United States and in Africa?

Actually, when I were young, in hometown, far from here, I never think that one day I can be a businessman. I can export my own product to all over the world. Yeah, that makes me amazing. I cannot imagine. It is kind of amazing, and you cannot imagine. You said you export 90% of your product, right? Yeah. Okay.

What's your biggest worry? What's the thing that makes you most worried for your business? The most worry is the politic, right? Policy. Policy. The most worry is the policy changing. And you see that right now, the police can change after two weeks. Henry's not saying anything you wouldn't hear from a small business in the United States.

He pointed to a box of clothes, headed to Jordan, eventually. The contract that we have to finish its order and ship to Jordan last two weeks ago. However, that because I have no sea line to go to Jordan right now. No ceilings to go to Jordan right now. So we have to keep product in my... company right now. Until you can ship it. Once again, geopolitical instability.

The question, really, or one of them anyway, is whether geopolitical instability will become a big enough disadvantage to outwey the economic advantages Vietnam has right now. Because as Neela said up at the top, its window of opportunity is not going to last forever. Coming up tomorrow on this program,

garage doors, American holidays, and Vietnamese factories. This final note on the way out today, I'm not sure we needed the official validation, but sometimes it's just good to have what you think, confirmed by people who actually study this stuff. The International Monetary Fund was out with its latest world economic outlook today. Here is the money quote from the organization's chief economist. The global outlook has abruptly darkened following the outbreak of war in the Middle East. Pierre Olivier Gorneshaw wrote, the war interrupted what had been a steady growth trajectory. End of quote right there.

Global growth this year slows from 3.3% to 3.1%. The caveat, and it is a very big one, is that that's the scenario if the bombing stops like now. Jordan Manj, Zanua Maharaj, Janet Wynn, Olga Oxman, and Virginia Kaysmith are the digital team. I'm Kaa Rizda. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is 8 p.m. What happens when your kid's childhood becomes your business? I'm Rie Mechreis, and this week on This Is Uncomfortable. we step inside the world of family influencers,

where childhood turns into content and content turns into income. What does it do to the kids at the center of it all? And what does it reveal about modern motherhood? I think part of the reason that mom influencers and family vloggers are so popular in the United States specifically is because American motherhood is so lonely. Be sure to listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.