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The article deploys servicisation as a case study to discuss economists' methods and the confirmation bias issue. Data show the average pattern of structural transformation in developing countries has since the early 1990s been servicisation, and the faster the growth, the greater the servicisation. Data also show that servicisation has been an extremely under-researched topic compared with industrialisation. This is an example of confirmation bias—weak links between theory and facts—that erodes the plausibility of policy advice. The paper analyses methods and their policing, and points to issues to address to reduce risks of confirmation bias by strengthening 'the power of facts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines prospects for policy to enhance contemporary economic development. Shortcomings of mainstream economic analyses are evident since the Cold War, with failure to establish policy doctrines engaging with developing countries' structural transformation: on average, not industrialisation, but servicization: capital and labour moving from agriculture to services. Faster-growing countries show greater servicization, yet overtly services-focused strategies are rare, and policy doctrine and economic analysis focuses on industrialisation. Literature searches show that servicization is largely ignored, reducing possibilities for policy-supported growth. Demonstrating this, the article argues that "internal" aspects of mainstream data and theory create severe confirmation bias, explaining this failure. If the "state" is there to support capitalism, in this area it seems to be doing rather badly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores ways to better understand corruption in Vietnam and the nature of Vietnamese capitalism. Given the current state of research, its arguments are not conclusive and focus upon empirics and issues in existing research. Regarding empirics, good data imply that corrupt payments by firms to Party officials are now so large – perhaps a quarter of gross domestic product – that their macro-systemic impacts must be, whilst still unclear, substantial. At such levels they likely have been allowing their recipients rapidly to build large asset-holdings. But the Party's generalised protection of demands for corrupt payments remains muted. Importantly, 2007 Party Directive #15 has been protecting Party members from corruption investigations, so that in effect they are not illegal. The research available, however, commonly treats Vietnamese corruption mainly as an indicator of state dysfunctionality, which fails to embrace the possibility that it is central to contemporary accumulation processes. The speculative argument is that at some point "pirates become businessmen" and the Vietnamese state will then shift, historically, from protecting corruption to protecting capital. In this framing, the decentralised nature of asset accumulation conditions political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 co-existence 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a history of the policy of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) towards state owned enterprises (SOEs). Despite an evident embrace of markets from the early 1990s, the VCP has resisted formal political change. The state sector has retained a privileged economic and political position. Policy has been made in the context of a political order where the interests of certain groups within the ostensibly hierarchical state have usually prevailed over attempts to generate coherent economic strategy. This has resulted in a situation where the formal ownership of SOEs is unclear, and real ownership is vested, apparently, in groups within a State Business Interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In power, the Vietnamese Communist Party has experienced three 'moments' of growth, each with some differences of detail and of meanings: 'traditional communism'; the transition from a planned to a market economy in the 1980s; and, since 1992, a 'socialist-oriented market economy'. For each, the article discusses the ideologically defined nature of change; intentionality—'how growth was to happen'; and the quantitative data used. It suggests that critiques throughout the period have engaged with the intentionality issue: in the first moment, by isolating the socialist relations of production within socialist construction as the cause of difficulties; more recently, by engaging with the lack of effective policy despite contemporary ideology's unreliable belief in policy as key to growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, the service sector has played an increasing role in economic growth in poor countries. This contradicts mainstream views of industrialisation as the central driver of growth. Yet, mainstream scholars and policy makers have so far failed to accommodate the "anomaly" of servicisation into development doctrine or theory - as keyword searches of the World Bank's World Development Reports and of academic output in EBSCO show. This article argues that ignoring the current reality of "deagriculturalising servicisation" (DAS) bears the risk of theory development without a base in evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the economic analysis of modern rich economies. It argues that standard economic theory acknowledges that it does not apply if there is own‐consumption and/or joint production and suggests that successful economic reforms of the 1980s have used markets to drive down costs in sectors where standard economic theory applies. This process has resulted in a situation where rich country economies are increasingly oriented to sectors – predominantly services – where markets work less well, namely those with extensive own‐consumption and joint production, where theory says that factor rewards and other prices cannot be determined by production and consumption conditions. Arguing that this can explain the “wages squeeze,” the paper concludes that other economic mechanisms should and have arisen to secure better welfare gains, thus explaining the recent shift in policy priorities of the ACTU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines international development assistance—aid. Donors assert that experts possess predictive knowledge and project belief in such knowledge into organizational form—the Logical Framework Approach. While such beliefs lack predictive power, as aid operates under multiple sovereignty conditions, no single authority determines truth. Donors ease pressure on experts by accepting variation in intervention logics, yet assert the validity of “single truth” knowledge; knowledge production practices have not basically changed. Belief that what is believed is true, revealed in aid work, illuminates the nature of policy in rich countries and helps explain low confidence in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of foreign trade on the environment in the cases of rice, cassava, and fish in Cambodia are examined in this article, but as a case study analyzing markers of developmental discursive practice. The study identifies and analyzes five rhetorical techniques in discursive practice—assertion, provincialism, dismissal of positive outcomes, reference to external causes, and policy fetishism—then argues that these have in common the denial of local voice. It argues that their deployment tends to increase where a discursive order is more contested. In general, the case study shows how much of development policy literature is rather disreputable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that more attention to economies of scope, especially in services production is needed to explain patterns of economic growth in Vietnam since the early 1990s. Existing studies have mistakenly focused on industrialization as a key growth driver, when contrary to policy, there has been servicization. By surveying some of the large relevant literature and data and discussing the resulting conceptual tangles, this paper argues that this mistake is in fact extremely common in analyses of global patterns of economic development. Other frameworks are clearly needed; therefore, it also considers the idea that analysis of Vietnam's economic growth should examine potential for economies of scope in traditional family joint production. It is argued that cultural factors support rational decision-making at this level despite absence of a clear cost function, and that this could help explain success and servicization. It then adds-in the issue of informality, to bolster a provisional argument that exploitation of economies of scope, especially in informal services sectors, offer strong explanations for Vietnam's rapid economic growth after the emergence of a market economy, and the slowdown from around the middle of the 'noughties'. Further research is clearly needed, both into what caused Vietnam's 'economic miracle' and why the expectation that it was industrialization came to dominate policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an understanding of the core drivers of the political economy of the ruling Communist Party in Vietnam. In the absence of political reform, the regime does not possess the powers required by the new conditions of a market economy and an increasingly open society. Designed for Soviet totalitarianism, and without popular support or authority, the formal political institutions are anachronistic and thus limit the range of powers available to the Party. As the regime is thus unable to reliably deploy policy unless it feels threatened, politics becomes a competition over spoils. Thus, if macroeconomic instability actually or potentially threatens the regime, the Politburo gains authority to act, and policy is deployed. Yet, as popular discontent mounts over corruption, favourable treatment of politically connected businesses, public education and health, and other areas not seen as regime-threatening, the disequilibrium leads to use of the security forces and increasing violence against popular opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a contribution to the political analysis of contemporary Vietnam -- a single-party state often wrongly assumed to be an author of reform and deploying considerable and varied powers -- this paper seeks to provide an understanding of the Vietnamese term 'authority' (uy) and its relationship to power. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan serves as a reference to the notion of authority in Vietnam and is compared to data: what the Vietnamese thought their word best translated as authority meant. The paper concludes that in the 'two-way street' of social contracts, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) actually has little authority. This helps to explain the chronic problems the VCP has faced in securing state capacity and generalised ability to implement policy. It highlights gaps between the current anachronistic use of Soviet-style power in Vietnam and what could be done if the regime deployed new powers based on authority. The authors conclude that, given the identified lack of authority, the VCP is no real Leviathan. Although more research is needed, this conclusion implies that proactive political tactics in Vietnam may move towards a search for acquiring authority in a 'two-way street' relationship within the Vietnamese political community. Enhanced state capacity and Party authority could follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the nature of the growing Vietnamese economy and its changing structural characteristics and contrasts this with two core elements of official thinking. The first element is the slogan of 'industrialisation and modernisation' (IM) and how this sits with the rather fast current growth in the services sectors, given the issues of transitioning through the recently reached 'middle income status'. The second is that of "a socialist-oriented market economy" (SOME) with reference to its origins, the nature of debates around it and its positive and negative implications for Vietnam's development. Our basic conclusions are that IM is misplaced, as it ignores services and is out-of-date, and the SOME has largely been a somewhat confused and transparent fig-leaf for support for essentially private commercial interests associated with certain state conglomerates. Recent changes around the 2016 XIIth Congress suggest that lessons are being learned by some elements in the Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that we may learn much about mainstream doctrines and practices of governance from watching what happens when they engage with international development issues. Cambodia is an illuminating example. Despite apparent material, organizational and intellectual superiority, Western engagement with poor countries often fails: Cambodia points us towards possible explanations as to why. The paper suggests that the lack of success in development intervention has had much to do with patterns visible in Western policy and governance doctrines: a desire to base the organization of interventions on cause--effect principles; an associated reckless application of imagined generic cause--effect relationships with little robust empirical foundation; and associated tendencies towards sectarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success − in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines contemporary Vietnamese politics and argues that many opportunities remain for political rethinking. It examines linguistic arguments that point to a perpetuation of traditional Communist ideas in two crucial areas-village elections and the treatment of 'policy.' It then juxtaposes this formal conservatism with two areas of tension. First, problems exist in addressing important policy questions related to rural development, poverty, and participation. These suggest that without major rethinking of fundamental political issues, such problems are increasingly hard to address. Second, it examines the context of formal politics, looking at evidence for successful contestation over leadership positions in villages and the rise of informal farmers' groups. Both have often led local officials to simple toleration and accommodation rather than exploitation of such trends to assist their own repositioning in ways that could gain them popular political support. Again, such trends highlight the void in formal political rethinking. Both of these areas of tension create considerable difficulties for donors and external partners, whose approaches are often premised upon both a familiar policy-driven role for the state in development and ignorance of local political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lao Tzu and Marx together provide the basis of an epistemology based on ignorance-not on knowledge. The failure of an epistemology based on knowledge is shown by the internal inconsistencies afflicting mainstream economics: Economic theory predicts certain empirical phenomena but these fail to reveal themselves. In fact, the strongest research finding in development economics is that there are almost no robust empirical relationships between an implemented policy and its desired outcomes in the real world. A theory of ignorance can highlight many economic contradictions-and may even prove useful in understanding autistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vietnam is widely seen as a development success, with rather rapid economic growth and a reported reduced role of the state, yet presents many paradoxes to conventional analytical frameworks. Two of relevance are accounts that stress a combination of a strongly hegemonic regime with weak internal sovereignty in terms of both the internal coherence of the apparat and its interactions with the rest of Vietnamese society, and also associated accounts that deny much role to intentionality in explaining apparent development success. This article will contextualise accounts of political intention and policy development towards water issues in Vietnam through an examination of two main empirics: the evolution of formal policy, understood as documents of the state, as well as of political intention, understood as documents of the ruling Party; and the by now extensive series of 'active' case studies that have examined donor as well as other projects in the sector. It will examine the notion, in the contexts suggested by the Vietnamese experience, that attempts to explain Vietnamese water policy, which have shown a tendency to shift away from assumptions that an analytical framework's categories may easily and without too much risk be extended across different contexts. Rather, comparisons of Vietnamese experience across contexts will tend, if they are to be persuasive, to shift to the use of languages that reflect ontological fluidity, in that what things mean is expected to change over time, without reference to an imagined transcendental and universal 'real'. In this sense, Vietnamese water policy may be usefully understood as an example of how 'success gives voice to the local'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reports research on IFGs in Vietnam that emerged into rural society from the early 1990s as the power of official cooperatives declined, and by the mid 2000s play a vital role in the farmers' institutional capacity. It is suggested that a minority of Vietnamese officials seem to have defended farmers informal organizations in several ways especially at local level.

This paper discusses issues to do with the empirical basis of modern economics and points towards the need to look more closely at the 'homogeneity assumption' that underpins much economic theory. It argues that severe problems currently prevent economics from becoming more persuasive to both students of economics and those outside the discipline. The issue involves the management of disciplinary boundaries, and excessive use of the 'homogeneity assumption.' Three areas of concern are explored. First is the literature on causes of growth, and the role of policy. The paper documents reasons to doubt the existence of robust relationships between growth and policy variables. Second is the 'homogeneity assumption' that different countries are usefully viewed as members of a single population. Third is evidence suggesting that an assumption of 'normal' maximizing behaviour has to be justified, not just assumed, and that regular deviations from the usual maximizing assumptions occur with gender and culture. The paper argues that a central issue in economic methodology and pedagogy should be, as North implicitly argues, the negotiation of disciplinary boundaries: what economics can versus cannot explain. It suggests more explicitly basing the choice of explanatory models on empirics identifying where the model applies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2003 in Vietnam saw good economic performance combined with ongoing high levels of corruption and Communist Party concerns over governance issues. Social differentiation continued to climb, with signs of gathering social unrest as "trickle-down" effects fell away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies a novel approach to analysis of the transition to the market economy in Vietnam, a country with a political economy that draws upon South-East Asian, Sinic and Leninist cultural elements. This was a 'conservative' transition, in the sense that no shift in political regime occurred. Understanding transition as a process where endogenous forces drive and resource institutional change, and far from dependent upon policy shifts, the article argues that it relied heavily upon two sets of phenomena. The first may be understood in terms of the creation and seeking out of economic rents, in the 'neoclassical' sense of resources available 'below economic costs'. When rents result from institutional obstacles to competition, institutional change can support relatively costless output gains. I argue for Vietnam that as the economic system switched from plan to market, so rent seeking shifted away from advantageous access to resources for plan implementation, to switching resources into forms that supported market-oriented activity. This 'rent switching' (RS) relied upon adaptive social relations, comparable to the 'competitive clientelism' of the SEA studies literature, that were preserved and augmented during transition. It also permitted mobilisation of resources derived from static efficiency gains. This framework contrasts with a second, more 'classical' in nature, that concentrates upon the creation of appropriable resources (ARs) and contestation over them. These help explain the medium and longer term, and how ways of appropriating resources supported the political economy of systemic change. At root, this is then to do with the emergence of factor markets (land, labour and capital), class formation and thus broader social and cultural change. The article thus argues that different economic theories provide useful insights into the social as well as the economic implications and nature of the transition to a market economy. Given that static efficiency gains, whilst significant in relative impact, tend to act over the short term, and, since growth processes take decades, the 'neoclassical' approach is ultimately less important than the 'classical' one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North Vietnamese collectivized agriculture remains are largely unknown to western researchers. As the main source of troops during the anti-French and anti-US wars, it warrants close study in order to improve understanding of probably the most important national liberation struggle this century. Agrarian policy in Vietnam changed radically in 1979 and 1980 with the introduction of a system of household contracts at least superficially similar to that adopted in China. It seems that the advocacy in socialist debate of large integrated production units is no longer fashionable. Analysis of a fully collectivized agricultural system requires a reformulation of categories used in the analysis of differentiation in capitalist systems. It also demands an understanding of the operation of power at different levels, both within the formal structures of the collective system and outside it, in such spheres as the domestic group. The cooperative needs to be viewed as a peripheral unit of a strongly centralized party-state system' that seeks to impose uniform standards of behavior upon it.