The Challenge of Reform in Indo-China

Since the mid-1980s, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have been engaged in increasingly comprehensive market economic reforms: Laos with considerable support from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; Vietnam while still facing a US embargo; and Cambodia with the ever-present Khmer Rouge threatening to derail the fragile peace accord reached in Paris in the Fall of 1991.

When the reforms began, all three countries were close allies of the Soviet Union.

Today, Vietnam and Laos are linked as observers to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), originally created by its neighbours in order to contain communism. The contributors to this volume - many of them economists - have analyzed this transformation from various perspectives, including foreign policy, historical, gender, macroeconomic, political and social.

Although Vietnam is given primary emphasis, the authors trace the experiences of all three countries from the end of the Second Indochina War in 1975 to recent times.

Throughout, their focus is on policy issues and the human dimension.