The outbreak of the global financial crisis, the fluctuation of commodity prices, and the economic slowdown of the major trading partners in 2008 and the early 2009 has brought about one of the most difficult challenges to lower-income economies in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS, i.e. Vietnam, Lao PDR and Cambodia) since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Foreign trade, including both export and import, severely declined, leading to serious contraction of economic growth. This research seeks to better understand the impacts of the global economic crisis on Vietnam’s foreign trade and policy responses, and from this, draw inferences for Lao PDR and Cambodia. To this aim, it asks the following questions:  To what extent was the foreign trade of Vietnam affected by the global economic crisis?  What were the policies by the Vietnamese government to arrest and reverse the decline in foreign trade?  What lessons can the Vietnamese experience offer to Lao PDR and Cambodia?