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This book, first published in 1987, examines the experience of the North Vietnamese economy during the struggle for national reunification and the Vietnam war. It chronicles the impact of war and Socialist Construction upon an extremely poor area left undeveloped by French colonial exploitation. The analysis focuses on the severe restraints that faced socio-economic development in North Vietnam, and the adverse effects of forced development based upon neo-Stalinist institutional models. Deep problems were encountered in attempting to implement Socialist Construction in the North, and wartime aid from fraternal Socialist countries masked the fundamental economic imbalances created by the development effort. After national reunification in 1975 the structural difficulties of the Northern economy and the shortcomings of its economic management system crushed the expectations of rapid peacetime development and led to the economic crisis of the late 1970s.

Preface -- The Sceptical Change Agent -- A Personal Note -- Book Outline -- Thanks -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- Scepticism and Practice -- Thinking the Unthinkable, Managing Diversity and 'Complexity' -- Doctrine and Development-The DAC -- Change and Intentionality: Similarity and Simplicity Versus Diversity and Complexity -- An Enthusiasm: Confusing Complexity of Explanation and Complexity 'In Reality' -- How Did We Get Here? -- Aid and Development: A Large Service Industry -- The Perils of Predictability -- The Fragility of Mainstream Doctrine: Thinking That Barbie is Real -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Part I: Development and Its Facts -- Note -- Chapter 2: Development Today: Its Facts -- The World Today-Images of Development -- Averages -- Preliminary Conclusions -- Alternative Facts of Development-Stories of Development -- What Does the Reinvention of Development Mean for Change Agents? -- Conclusions -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 3: Development in the Early Years and the Facts of Underdevelopment Since WWII -- Underdevelopment After WWII-A High Tide of Aggregation in a World of Decolonisation and Cold War -- Decolonisation, the United Nations and Trusteeship -- Doctrine, Aggregation and 'the Development Process' -- The World Bank in the 1950s -- The UN in the 1950s -- What Was Believed About Belief? -- The Effects Upon the Organisation of Development-Projects and Policy -- Aid Projects -- Policy as Key: Reason Not Roads -- The Facts of Development -- Evidence for Ignorance -- Levine and Zervos-Empirical Bases for Scepticism -- Arguing About What Works When Arguably Nothing Knowably Does-Mainstream Development Doctrine -- The Certainties of Market-Unfriendly Development Doctrine -- The Certainties of Market-Friendly but Pro-poor Development Doctrine

Important parts of development practice, especially in key institutions such as the World Bank, are dominated by economists. In contrast, Development Studies is largely based upon multidisciplinary work in which anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists, and others play important roles. Hence, a tension has arisen between the claims made by Development Economics to be a scientific, measurable discipline prone to wide usage of mathematical modelling, and the more discursive, practice based approach favoured by Development Studies.The aim of this book is to show how the two disciplines ha

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Tables -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Chronology -- 1 Introduction -- Part I: The Higher-level Agricultural Producer Cooperative -- 2 The Producer Cooperative in Rural Society -- 3 A Reexamination of the Basic System -- Part II: North Vietnamese Agrarian Policy, 1974-1979 -- 4 The New Management System and the Thai Binh Conference -- Part III: Life at the Grass Roots -- 5 The Sample in National Context -- 6 The Reform of a Nominal Cooperative-My Tho, 1974-1975 -- 7 The Cooperative and Its Constituent Households-The Labor Mobilization Problem -- 8 Pig-Rearing as a Focus for Conflict -- 9 The Nonagricultural Subsidiary Branches-Collectivization or Taxation? -- 10 Management Committee Control and the Origins of Output Gains -- Part IV: The Agrarian Question in North Vietnam -- 11 The Agrarian Question and Cooperative Nominalization -- 12 A Solution to the Agrarian Question? -- Appendices -- Notes -- Glossary of Vietnamese Technical and Vernacular Terms -- Bibliography -- Index

The commentary addresses, with constructive suggestions, the tension between common beliefs that development knowledge is not predictive and the general requirement that it be used to support instrumental action (using devices such as the log frame or theories of change that embody ideas that X will lead to Y). I suggest that this tension is best resolved differently from much current practice, which tends to fudge the issue. I draw two central implications: first, that stakeholders to a possible development intervention decide formally, before proceeding, whether the context and knowledge of it suggest that it is wise to proceed instrumentally or not; second, that a positive aspect of the 'fudge' is that a significant share of development interventions, whilst organized according to instrumental principles (such as the log frame or theories of change), in fact lack suitable knowledge and so are, in reality, non-instrumental. In such contexts, development professionals, in fact, have well-developed but informal methods for acting 'non-instrumentally'.

This paper discusses possible conceptual foundations of formal models of endogenous change processes, understood here as movements between market and non-market transactions at the level of the national economy. It links but does not merge movements of resources with shifts in the pattern of transaction types. In focussing on transaction types, it deploys insights from Commons, Coase, and Godelier, to discuss how framing transaction types as the fundamental 'thing to be explained' points to the value of choices about how activity may best be organised, which requires a general concept, which can be found in Commons' 'going concern', applicable to transactions focussing on markets or not. It entails the possibility of institutional change and shifts in the location of economic resources without formal policy change. It suggests that the main requirement for such change processes are dualistic incentive patterns that operate upon institutional choice and/or development, which derive at root from experienced contrasts between the realities of existing and normatively privileged systems, and others, normatively initially deemed inferior, that offer key actors greater economic efficiency. Moves of institutional activity from one to the other are thus conceptually processes of endogenous systemic change. System in this sense is thus viewed as a coexistence of alternatives. The motivation comes directly from consideration of two very different historical moments: endogenously driven shifts 'from plan to market' in countries attempting central planning, and contemporary pressures in market economies from areas of the economy, such as services, where joint production and/or own consumption imply irremediable market failure and so non-market based economic institutions offer greater economic efficiency and may therefore attract both resources (factors of production) and investment in development of suitable transactions and their organisation.

The paper develops an argument for the criteria that a theory of ignorance should meet. It starts from the distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental action. Usually, the latter is considered irrational and the former rational as being based upon known cause-effect relations whilst the latter is not. I argue that the former requires a reasoned basis in predictive knowledge of cause and effect, without which good council is either for inaction or noninstrumental action. The argument proceeds by exploiting mainstream statistical methods to explore an example of a 'metric of advised ignorance' to guide explicit reasoned choice allowing rejection of instrumental action in favour of inaction or non-instrumental action. The argument then explores a case study of how such rejection is disallowed by official requirements in International Development Assistance (aid) that contexts must always be believed predictive and so action organised as instrumental. This shows the basic irrationality of mainstream policy rationality. The paper then discusses wider social epistemological issues of this irrationality and concludes with a list of criteria a theory of ignorance should meet.