ABSTRACT
The governments of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam cautiously initiated in 1979 a limited process of economic reform. Predictably, the output of many of these reforms was soon compromised by internal, ideological debates over the optimum pace and direction of socialist transformation. It was clear by early 1979 that the economic policies instituted in Vietnam after 1976 were not reducing the serious economic and social problems facing the newly unified country. Conservative elements at the Fifth Party Congress in March 1982, generally pleased with the economic results of the limited reforms introduced but concerned with their downstream ideological ramifications, directed a retreat from the so-called “reformist tendency.” The year 1981 proved to be highly significant in the history of the Lao PDR as it marked the outset of the First Five-Year Plan. The five-year plan accorded first priority to increasing agricultural and forestry output.
