ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an adequate causal explanation for a phenomenal historical experience: why the Asian communist states adopted economic reforms and made their transitions from the centrally planned economy to market-oriented or market-based economy. It examines the country variations in the causes of reform and transition from the centrally planned economy to market socialism (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos) or market economy (Cambodia). As China's economic transition has benefited from Hong Kong, North Korean new economic changes could not be realized without the continued support of Seoul. North Korea has achieved notable rapprochement with South Korea under the "Sunshine Policy," which has established closer economic and diplomatic ties between the two Koreas. Vietnam's economic transition was also in many ways a byproduct of the international geopolitics of the eighties and early nineties, too. Vietnamese reform policy, doi moi, heavily influenced the Laotian government's decision to reform and adopt the MEN.
