Evaluate the economic performance of one of the ASEAN transitional economies – Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam – from 1970 to the present and examine its problems and prospects for reform and transformation. IntroductionThese four countries Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam that formed the Indochina peninsula (refer to map) had attained independence from European colonial powers through revolutionary means, with the exception of Burma, and this greatly affected their subsequent policy-making in economic development. Eventually they adopted a socialist and centrally-planned system and were isolated with the rest of the Southeast Asian countries due to the Cold War. As a result their economies were underdeveloped and lagging behind their neighboring countries. With the end of the Cold War, collapse of Soviet Union and faltering economies, these four countries embarked on a reform process differing in the nature and pace though. So what is this reform process? It is to systematically transform from the existing centrally-planned economy to a market economy typically involving both the political and economic elements and this process by which changes occur is known as transition process. I have chosen to evaluate Vietnam’s economic performance because Vietnam is unique among the transitional economies in several respects: like its giant neighbour China, it has retained a socialist one party political monopoly , taken a gradualist approach to reform, and its reform programme ‘doi moi’ has been very successful. In all, Vietnam successfully combined economic liberalism with political conservatism to create a Vietnamese variation of a market economy, that is still committed to socialism, to be considered as a potential "Asian tiger" economy, with a population of 77 million and a labor force that is well-educated, diligent, and young.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 will provide ...
