In the last 25 years, Vietnam has successfully moved from being one of the poorest countries in the world to a lower middle-income country thanks to a set of political and economic reforms (Doi Moi) launched in the late 1980s. Vietnam has achieved a remarkable reduction in poverty rates from 49.4% in 1998 to 2.4% in 2012 ($1.25/a day); as well as, a notable decrease in the percentage of people living with less than $2/a day from 78.1% to 12.5% during the same 17 years.