ABSTRACT
The reform epoch has brought dramatic sharpening in income, spatial, and class stratification in Vietnam. Particularly significant are growing income differences between North and South, between the densely populated and dynamic Mekong delta and other regions, between predominantly agrarian and agro-commercial industrial areas, and between Vietnamese and minority peoples. If a European approach is barely beginning to emerge out of the debris attendant on the demise of state socialism in that region, the Asian approach took form in China and Vietnam in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. If collective agriculture rested on the power of the state, nowhere did it successfully eliminate the challenge presented by the agrarian household. Agriculture was the centerpiece of a comprehensive reform whose dimensions eventually included the opening to foreign capital, dramatic expansion of foreign and domestic trade, expansion of the private sector, partial freeing of population mobility, decentralized control of industry, and price reform.
