"No Responsibility and No Rice": The Rise and Fall of Agricultural Collectivization in Vietnam

 Communist leaders in Vietnam attempted to use agricultural collectivization to transform a poor, agrarian country into a modern, socialist nation with an industrialized economy. Collectivized agricultural production lacked sufficient economic incentives for Vietnamese farmers; they preferred to produce privately for household consumption or the free market. State-initiated reforms to collectivize agriculture failed to improve the performance of the agricultural sector, and eventually the Vietnamese Communist Party was forced to abandon collectivization altogether. Once farmers were freed from collective labor and could pursue private production for the free market, Vietnam’s agricultural output skyrocketed.
Land Inequality or Productivity: What Mattered in Southern Vietnam after 1975?
Land redistribution and agricultural collective production were the key components of agrarian reforms implemented by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the south of the country after 1975. Land inequality was serious in the region under the Republic of Vietnam's regime. The new government struggled with agricultural collectivisation contributing to the decline in rice productivity. This study explains the persistence of a market-based agricultural production in the southern economy under the new political regime. Beside the economic reasons and arguments of local peasants' everyday politics cited in the literature, we argue that the de facto political power of the middle-class landowners was an important factor impeding the performance of agricultural cooperatives. It also implies that agricultural productivity was more vital than land inequality during the study period. We apply the model of Acemoglu and Robinson explaining how de facto political power helps elites to maintain their economic institutions in spite of a political change.
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.