ABSTRACT
Vietnam has always been dependent on foreign aid. While the country was divided and during the second Indochina war, it received extensive economic aid from the protecting powers - the USA on the one hand and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Bilateral and multilateral development cooperation with Vietnam gradually began to take shape in 1991/92, although it took some time for disbursements to occur on any appreciable scale. The financial support of the international financial institutions became increasingly important for Vietnam after all external sources of funds had been largely blocked from 1990 to 1992 and the restrictive macroeconomic course followed with the utmost consistency in this period did not appear to be permanently sustainable. Like development cooperation as a whole, German-Vietnamese cooperation was bedeviled by major start-up difficulties, which were further exacerbated by differences of opinion over the return of Vietnamese nationals from Germany.
