ABSTRACT
Viet Nam is a large East Asian country. The successive wars and invasions that plagued it during most of the XXth century, besides inflicting enormous human and material losses, did not allow it to participate in the so-called “Asian miracle,” nor to pursue a self-centered, centrally planned socialist development path as China did. After the end of the American war, Vietnamese economic policies initially attempted to incorporate the South into the traditional centrally planned socialist model of the North. Vietnam’s achievements in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, structural change, and technological advancement, albeit impressive, have not been as stellar so far as those of China, due largely to the crippling legacy of the American war. The economic policies of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the 1945-1975 were war economy policies, rather than socialist development policies.
