This paper documents a Vietnam Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for the year 2003. The 2003 Vietnam SAM contains 275 accounts including 112 production activity accounts, 112 retail commodity accounts, three transportation margins accounts, three trade margins accounts, 14 primary factor accounts,...

Some recent literature in the meta-analysis category where results from a range of studies are brought together throws doubt on the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses what meta-analysis has to say about the effectiveness of foreign aid in terms...

Vietnam has been among the most successful East Asian economies, especially in weathering the external shocks of recent globalization crises—the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and the 2008-09 great recession, financial crisis and collapse of global trade. Its success contradicts its...

In this paper we assess the IMF approach to economic reform in developing countries. The impact of IMF program participation on economic growth has been evaluated empirically in a cross-country literature, with little evidence of IMF programs having been successful. This suggests that a fresh...

This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power on farmers. agricultural investment decisions. Our main result is that households significantly increase their investment in land improvement as a...

The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro and meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature and, taking inspiration from the program...

Measurement is a key issue in the literature on price incentive bias induced by trade policy. We introduce a general equilibrium measure of the relative effective rate of protection, which generalizes earlier protection measures. For our fifteen sample countries, results indicate that the...

The paper examines the impact of industrial protection, agricultural export taxes, and overvaluation of the exchange rate on the balance between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. A variety of agricultural terms-of-trade indices are constructed to measure the policy bias against...

Globalization poses special challenges for economies in transition, particularly those which have been slow to reform systems of administered prices. Such allocation mechanisms now encounter significant friction from external market forces, and it is vital for policymakers to better anticipate...

Summary Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both household and plot levels, we show that crop...