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This study analyses the difficulties and problems encountered in transforming the Vietnamese financial sector from one subordinate to government objectives and goals to an autonomous sector guided by market forces and competitive pressures. Here, the history of financial sector liberalization is traced and close attention paid to the activities and autonomy of the State Bank of Vietnam, the institution responsible for the supervision and regulation of the financial sector in Vietnam. Overall, the authors argue that ensuring a timely, fair and transparent supervision and regulation of the financial sector is of central importance to financial sector development and stability. Liberalizing financial markets is not solely a question of limiting and/or restricting government influence but may in fact involve the opposite, the influence and power of supervisory and regulatory institutions in many cases needing to be strengthened.

Little is known about the extent to which public spending is targeted towards the poor in Mozambique. The objective of the present paper is to assess whether public expenditures on education and health, in particular, are successful at reaching the poorer segments of the Mozambican population. Standard non-behavioural benefit-incidence methodology is applied, combining individual client information from survey data with provincial-level data on the cost of service provision. Most of the public services we are able to measure turn are moderately progressive, although some of the instruments we could not measure are probably less equally distributed. In Mozambique it appears that regional and gender imbalances in health and education are more significant than income-based differences. Nevertheless, increased public expenditures on health and education—such as that related to the HIPC initiative—are likely to have significant poverty reducing effects.