Melanie Beresford

Doi Moi in Review: The Challenges of Building Market Socialism in Vietnam

Abstract Two decades ago the Vietnamese Communist Party embarked on a transformation from central planning towards a “socialist market economy under state guidance.” It looked to East Asian development models, particularly the role of state enterprises (SEs), combined with the creation of a “civilised and equitable” society. The article argues that, in the case of SEs, the states inability, especially under donor pressure, to provide crucial investment support to the SEs meant that foreign investors and the domestic non-state sector began to dominate the economic landscape. While state-led development remains feasible, it requires a clear and more authoritative industry policy; otherwise, the balance of interventionism could eventually tip towards cronyism. Further, the vagueness of the term “civilised and equitable” society leaves open both conformity with the post-Washington consensus and the possibility to achieve more aggressive redistributive measures, including redistribution of power. In practice, inclusion in and exclusion from successful public-private networks has been crucial for the capacity of individuals to participate in the rising prosperity of the market economy and has driven a process of rising regional inequality and the emergence of a new social class structure.

National unification and economic development in Vietnam

Political unity and economic separation - the colonial period economy of the Republic of Vietnam, 1955-75 southern agriculture household and collective in Vietnamese agriculture the Vietnamese industrialisation debate socialist commodity production.

Authority relations and economic decision-making in Vietnam : an historical perspective

Establishment of the DRV institutions 1945-55 the party state 1955-86 the high reform period 1986 to present concluding remarks.

The Cambodian clothing industry in the post-MFA environment: a review of developments

The period 2005–2008 provides an opportunity to examine the impact of ending the Multi-Fibre Arrangements system of quotas on the development of Cambodias clothing industry and the wider Cambodian economy. The question is particularly interesting because (1) Cambodia has incorporated independently monitored labour standards and trade union rights into its labour law and (2) the clothing industry plays a centrally important role in growth of exports, GDP and employment. The paper shows that with the exception of the EU market, the increasingly competitive environment did not undermine expansion of the industry prior to the onset of global recession in 2008. The reason for continued success lay mainly in improved price competitiveness through exchange rate movements and the shift of China towards more upmarket production. Productivity gains seem an unlikely source of continued rapid growth. Finally, an examination of monitoring reports indicates that labour standards did not decline as a result of increased competitive pressures. Changes scheduled to take place in the monitoring system might, however, reduce its independence and permit the growth of a sector of the industry with lower standards.

Political economy of the environment in Vietnam

The soldier comes to another front now, the environmental front…. without environmental recovery, Vietnam cannot have economic recovery. (Vo Nguyen Giap)

Layoffs in China's City of Textiles: Adaptation to Change

Abstract Urban poverty among laid-off workers has become one of the major challenges confronting China due to the massive retrenchment of state employees since the 1990s. While a great deal of research has focused on the general situation or the analysis of aggregate-level data, the workers themselves have been given much less attention. Based on data from Shaanxi Province, this paper examines the current status of the former state workers and their families in the once-prosperous “City of Textiles,” a district of state-owned textile mills and affiliated residential areas where the risk of slum development and marginalisation of former state workers has increased since economic reform. These textile workers had devoted themselves to hard work, acted as communist zealots and performed family duties at the same time, believing that the government would take care of their families. However, the poverty induced by the layoff programme has not only altered their lives and deteriorated intra-family relationships, but has also pushed some laid-off workers into various illegal activities to maintain household finances and to pay for rapidly rising tuition fees and medical expenses. We contest the commonly held view that poverty faced by former state workers is of their own making and show that current government anti-poverty strategies are inadequate to deal with the problem.

Market Failure or Governmental Failure? A Study of China's Water Abstraction Policies

Chinas water abstraction policies are significant for illustrating the application of market-based instruments in a transitional and developing country and for shedding light on improving Chinas water management system. This article presents a new approach to analysing applications of market-based instruments for water resources in China. Expanding the analysis beyond a rational choice approach, it demonstrates the institutional dimension of policy implementation at the local level in China. Four peculiar features of Chinas water institutions influence local governments in dealing with water abstraction differently from how regulators might expect. This explains local governmental failures and the implementation of water abstraction policies in several ways, including the setting of charges at low levels, a lack of necessary monitoring and sanctions, few incentives to collect charges diligently, and failure to provide accessible information for the public.

Paving the pathway for women's empowerment? A review of information and communication technology development in Bangladesh

This paper reviews the recent situation in information and communication technology (ICT) development in Bangladesh, with particular reference to mobile phone technologies. While mass access to ICT is often portrayed as the great socio-economic leveller, we show that in the Bangladesh case the existing evidence illustrates something quite different. Despite the high profile of certain female politicians, Bangladesh performs very poorly on international measures of gender equality and the reasons are deeply rooted in social and cultural norms. As a consequence, programmes aimed at poverty alleviation through widespread deployment of ICT in rural areas are disproportionately beneficial to men, even when targeted primarily at women. We conclude that unless ICT programmes are more sensitive to the causes of gender inequity, the ICT revolution in Bangladesh is likely to deepen rather than ameliorate the gender divide.

A methodology for analysing the process of economic reform in Vietnam: The case of domestic trade

Examination of the process of reform in domestic trade suggests that Vietnamese economic reforms are the result of an essentially political process dating back to the 1970s. Political change can be explained in terms of the interests and objectives of groups in society interacting with the economic context to produce political action. Also important is the changing cognition of different actors about how their objectives could be given expression in reality. Pressure for change came both from the expression of economic interests and from the sense of people working in areas such as the domestic trade apparatus that they were caught in an impasse in attempting to carry out their day‐to‐day functions. During the 1980s, as experiments with modifying the system were tried, the relative importance of different interests changed and ideological positions shifted in response. What began as an attempt to repair the central planning system developed, through this process, into a systemic critique which opened the ...

The North Vietnamese State‐Owned Industrial Sector: Continuity and Change

Enterprise reform in the state‐owned industrial sector of northern Vietnam is examined in the context of changes in the political and macroeconomic environment of the enterprise. The article argues that reform has been partly a ‘bottom up’ process in which policy makers have been compelled to adapt to changes, often referred to by the Vietnamese as ‘fence‐breaking’ activities, in the actual operation of the economy. The transition to a market economy has been a gradual process and those who argue that measures introduced circa 1989 to abolish the key instruments of central planning have succeeded in abolishing central planning itself are mistaken. Many institutional features of the socialist economy persist within the State‐Owned Enterprise sector and continue to influence the transition process.