ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to bring out the deep-rooted structural problems of the North Vietnamese economy. The analysis has taken a strong position in favour of a view of the DRY economy that sees it as having been dominated by ‘aggravated shortage’: a structural combination of the chronic shortages familiar from developed centrally-planned economies with an extensive development of market-oriented activities. Vietnamese economic management in the years immediately after reunification remained steeped in the methods and thinking appropriate to the day-to-day realities of aggravated shortage and the corresponding behaviour of neo-Stalinist institutions. In North Vietnam socio-economic conditions were in many ways extreme. First, the level of pre-Revolutionary economic development was minimal, and high population densities meant that both the potential and the actual economic surpluses were very low. Second, the area’s population had a long and sophisticated historical experience with centralised administrative systems.
