Title:	Land in Transition
Authors:	Ravallion, Martin
Keywords:	Land reform—Vietnam
Issue Date:	2008
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	No thoughtful observer can fail to be struck by the size and potential welfare significance of the legal reforms and other institutional changes that are required to transform a control economy into a market economy. The stakes are particularly high when it is an economy in which the bulk of the population lives in extreme poverty. One motivation for us in undertaking this research was to understand the impacts on living standards of the dramatic economic changes that have been going on in rural Vietnam. Vietnam has arguably gone further and faster than any other developing socialist economy in implementing market-based reforms to the key rural institutions determining how the main nonlabor asset of the poor, agricultural land, is allocated across households. Have these reforms promoted greater efficiency? If so, did the efficiency gains come at a cost to equity? On balance, was poverty reduced? We hope that this book will help answer these questions. There was another motivation for us: a desire to do something better from a methodological point of view than what is typically on offer for assessing the poverty impacts of economywide changes, including structural reforms. One can hardly be happy with “impact assessments” that rely on either anecdotes from observer accounts of uncertain veracity or highly aggregated “off-the-shelf” economic models of uncertain empirical relevance to the specific setting. Finding something credible between these extremes is not easy. We believe, however, that much more can be learned about economywide reforms from the careful analysis of household surveys, especially when that analysis is guided by both economic theory and knowledge of the historical and social contexts. That is what we hope to demonstrate in this book. en
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55116
ISBN:	978-0-8213-7276-0
Appears in Collections:	Rural Development Studies

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