Land in Transition

Ravallion, Martin

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dc.contributor.author	Ravallion, Martin
dc.date.accessioned	2019-03-19T06:39:39Z
dc.date.accessioned	2023-07-22T06:48:51Z
dc.date.available	2019-03-19T06:39:39Z
dc.date.available	2023-07-22T06:48:51Z
dc.date.issued	2008
dc.identifier.isbn	978-0-8213-7276-0
dc.identifier.uri	http://10.215.13.25/handle/123456789/55116
dc.description	No thoughtful observer can fail to be struck by the size and potential welfare significance of the legal reforms and other institutional changes that are required to transform a control economy into a market economy. The stakes are particularly high when it is an economy in which the bulk of the population lives in extreme poverty. One motivation for us in undertaking this research was to understand the impacts on living standards of the dramatic economic changes that have been going on in rural Vietnam. Vietnam has arguably gone further and faster than any other developing socialist economy in implementing market-based reforms to the key rural institutions determining how the main nonlabor asset of the poor, agricultural land, is allocated across households. Have these reforms promoted greater efficiency? If so, did the efficiency gains come at a cost to equity? On balance, was poverty reduced? We hope that this book will help answer these questions. There was another motivation for us: a desire to do something better from a methodological point of view than what is typically on offer for assessing the poverty impacts of economywide changes, including structural reforms. One can hardly be happy with “impact assessments” that rely on either anecdotes from observer accounts of uncertain veracity or highly aggregated “off-the-shelf” economic models of uncertain empirical relevance to the specific setting. Finding something credible between these extremes is not easy. We believe, however, that much more can be learned about economywide reforms from the careful analysis of household surveys, especially when that analysis is guided by both economic theory and knowledge of the historical and social contexts. That is what we hope to demonstrate in this book.
dc.description	en	en_US
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.publisher	Palgrave Macmillan	en_US
dc.subject	Land reform—Vietnam	en_US
dc.title	Land in Transition	en_US
dc.type	Book	en_US