Overview

The policy reforms called for in the transition from a socialist command-economy to a developing market-economy bring both opportunities and risks to the living standards of a country's citizens. Starting in the early 1980s in Vietnam, reforms were introduced to promote the transition from the socialist mode of agricultural production to market-based agriculture. The book assesses the welfare impacts, both in terms of efficiency and equity, of the main elements of Vietnam's agrarian reforms, namely the dismantling of the old collectives and assigning land to households, and the introduction of a market in land-use rights. Assessing the welfare impacts of an economy-wide reform is never going to be easy. One does not have the enormous informational advantage of being able to observe non-participants in the reform at the same time as one observes participants. The lack of a comparison group means that we must rely more heavily on economic theory to infer the counterfactual of what the economy would have looked like without the reform and assess what types of households are likely to gain from the reforms, and which are likely to lose. The book offers a set of methods for this purpose, drawing on the tool kit of modern economics. The book's principal finding is that, while there were certainly some losers (including amongst the poor), on balance Vietnam's agrarian reforms were poverty reducing, though more so in some regions than others. This finding, and a number of the more detailed findings along the way, will have implications for other countries that have not embarked on similar reforms, including neighboring China. The book's findings will also have implications for broader issues of social protection in developing rural economies.

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9780821372753

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Reviews

'Land in Transition provides a thought-provoking read. Through a comprehensive, yet comprehensible analysis of lessons learned from Vietnam's land reforms, Ravallion and van de Walle share with us insights gained from a thoughtful study of key issues for poverty reduction and social protection in a developing country on the road to a market economy.' - Moe Thuzar, Asean Economic Bulletin 'This excellent book...is a valuable publication, which should be of great interest to scholars and students of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian studies, as well as to anyone interested in development studies and transition economies.' - Newsletter of the Association of Southeast Asian Studies

Author Information

MARTIN RAVALLION is Senior Research Manager in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics, and Political Science, UK, and has taught economics at L.S.E., Oxford University, the Australian National University, and Princeton University. His main research interests over the last twenty years have concerned poverty and policies for fighting it. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies on this topic, and he has written extensively on this and other subjects in economics, including two books and over 150 p

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