On 18th and 19th June 1999, the Asian Historical Statistics Project held a workshop on Vietnam entitled "Quantitative Economic History of Vietnam". The aim of the workshop was to harmonise formats and compare procedures already undertaken by members of the Vietnam research team. All papers delivered had to take a common shape, namely an outline of data sources, a description of estimation procedures and then a statement of main findings. The workshop proved to be fully international, multidisciplinary and highly stimulating.
The workshop was organised and primarily funded by the Asian Historical Statistics Project. It received some additional support from the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, which met the travel expenses of our Vietnamese colleagues, and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which kindly provided refreshments. The Maison Franco-Japanaise (Nishi Futsu Kaikan) in central Tokyo provided the venue and some office support. An opening address was given by the Councillor for Culture of the French Embassy in Tokyo, stressing the importance of multilateral research, such as the project undertaken by COE.
The participants included Vietnamese from both Hanoi and Saigon as well as overseas Vietnamese, Japanese from Hitotsubashi and other several Universities, American, German, Dutch, Russian and French scholars. The majority of participants were not specialists of Vietnam but researchers whose work focused on Japan and China. This allowed for comparative views to be exchanged. Further, it was not just scholars who were involved. Valuable contributions, both through papers and comments, were made by representatives from international organisations, governmental offices, and private institutions as follows :
| 01 | Presenter | Yoko Takada (Keiai University ; Japanese historian specializing in Cochinchina), "Historical Agrarian Economy of Cochinchina" |
|---|---|---|
| Discussant | by Jean-Pascal Bassino (Paul ValeLry University, Montpellier, France ; economist, coordinator of the research group on Vietnam) | |
| 02 | Presenter | Ta Thi Thuy (Institute of History of Vietnam, Hanoi, Vietnam ; historian), "Historical Agrarian Economy of Tonkin" |
| Discussant | Debin Ma (COE, Hitotsubashi University ; economist) | |
| 03 | Presenter | Jean-Dominique Giacometti (COE, Hitotsubashi University ; historian), "Historical Agrarian Economy of Annam" |
| Discussant | Takashi Kurosaki (IER, Hitotsubashi University ; specialist of rural economy) | |
| 04 | Presenter | Jean-Dominique Giacometti "Prices and Wages: Historical Trends and Interpretation" |
| Discussant | Yoko Takada | |
| 05 | Presenter | Hironobu Nakagawa (COE, Hitotsubashi University ; economist and specialist of macro-econometrics), "Exchange Rates and Exchange Rate Policies in Vietnam" |
| Discussant | FreLderic BurguieMre (Indocam Asset Management Japan) | |
| 06 | Presenter | Maks Banens (Amiens University, France ; demographer), "Population and Labor Force in Historical Vietnam" |
| Discussant | Osamu Saito (IER, Hitotsubashi University ; economist and demographer) | |
| 07 | Presenter | David Del Testa (University of California, Davis ; historian), "Historical Economy of Railway Transportation" |
| Discussant | Michiki Kikuchi. (Hosei University) | |
| 08 | Presenter | Jean-Pascal Bassino, "History of Public Finance in Vietnam" |
| Discussant | Eiji Tajika (Faculty of Economics, Hitotsubashi University) | |
| 09 | Presenter | Bui Thi Lan Huong (University of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City), "Estimating Vietnam International Trade" |
| Discussant | Kyoji Fukao (IER, Hitotsubashi University) | |
| 10 | Presenter | Thomas Engelbert (Humbolt University, Berlin ; historian, specialist of the minorities in South Vietnam), "Ethnic Chinese Economic Activities in Vietnam." This paper, which discussed the role of the ethnic Chinese community in Vietnam using qualitative data, was discussed by all the participants, |
| 11 | Presenter | Vu Quang Viet (Statistics Division, United Nations), "The Conversion of the MPS to SNA Data: National Accounts of Vietnam.." |
| Discussant | Masaaki Kuboniwa (IER, Hitotsubashi University) | |
| 12 | Presenter | Nguyen Quan (General Statistic Office, Hanoi), "Vietnam Economy 1946 - 1954 and Vietnam Real Situation of its Statistical Data" |
| Discussant | Thomas Engelbert | |
| 13 | Presenter | Severine Blaise Ph.D. Candidate in Economics (IER, Hitotsubashi University), "North Vietnam and South Vietnam National Accounts 1954-1975: an Overview" |
| Discussant | Nguyen Quan | |
| 14 | Presenter | Tran Van Tho (Obirin University), "Long term Economic Statistics of Vietnam Before Reunification" |
| Discussant | Alexei Ponomarenko (Statistics Office, Moscow, Russia) |
The papers presented were greater diversity than the title of the conference might suggest. The first reason for this diversity was the long period of time considered by the Workshop, namely the first three quarters of this century. The second reason was that for Vietnam, more than for most countries of the world, this century has been broken into very different periods of an often divided national history. The papers presented during the workshop identified and explored the main turning points of this history.
The first period started with the conquest by the French in the late 19th century and finished in 1902 when the strong central "Gouvernement geLneLral" was established. To bring it into life its creator, Governor Paul Doumer, established a complete set of new indirect taxes, the most important being on opium, and the most unpopular being on salt and alcohol. All had a disturbing effect on the economy of Vietnam. It can be said that the entire existence of Vietnam under French rule was shaped by the creation of the Gouvernement geLneLral and its public finance system. The heavy and disturbing burden of taxes on alcohol and salt were at the root of the famous uprising of 1907-1908. In spite of changes in the policy of French colonial rule, no satisfactory solution to the problem of taxation was ever found, and the taxation system copied from the "Ancien ReLgime" remained one of the most important grievances against the French colonial occupation.
Jean-Pascal Bassino did not leave it at this level of analysis but instead presented a detailed study of the public finances of French Indochina. He pointed out the drop in contribution to the common public finance (the Gouvernement general level) by the North (Tonkin), and the increasing share of the South (Cochinchina), throughout the colonial period. Even in terms of local budgets Tonkin, which had the largest at the beginning of the century, was overtaken in size by Cochinchina in the 1930s. As the population of Tonkin remained larger than the population of Cochinchina, this suggested that the economic development of Tonkin occured at a comapatively slower rate. This trends was of importance to the general history of a country divided in two, which experienced a terrible reunification war, the intensity of which seems to have been proportional to this imbalance.
However, we can consider the taxation system, and the transfer and allocation of resources it permitted, can be placed at the root of the prosperity of Vietnam during the First World War and the twenties.
The prosperity and development of Vietnam was largely based on new infrastructures. This fact was strikingly illustrated in David Del Testa's paper on the growing railroad network and the economic transformation this brought to the countryside of Vietnam. Based on a new corpus of documents and a perceptive analysis, he showed how the local population utilised, in an innovative way, a new and imported technology for their own development by adapting it to their own purposes and practices.
Another study, traversing many of the topics dealt with in the workshop, was by Thomas Engelbert, on the ethnic Chinese. This permitted us to penetrate deeper into the economic complexity of Vietnam over a long period. The "Hoa" have been settled in Vietnam for a long time with diverse fortunes and occupations, and commercial networks penetrating all regions and villages. They have always been a main link between Vietnam and the rest of Asia. If the prosperity of Vietnam is based on its connections with its regional environment, it is in large part thanks to this sector of the population.
The next period commences with the crisis of 1929. Its impact on currency was analysed by Hironobu Nakagawa (with Bassino), using macro-econometric methods. His work clearly demonstrated that the Vietnamese silver currency, the piastre, was an efficient arrangement in the context of currencies of the Far Eastern countries up until the beginning of the Great Depression. The piastre in this context supported the prosperity of the twenties.
To deal with the crisis the colonial authorities pegged the piastre to the franc in order to facilitate the entry of Vietnamese products into the French market. This decision turned out to have a negative impact when economic recovery emerged in the Pacific and seems to have been a major turning point in the history of Vietnam. Nakagawa concluded that the Vietnamese currency with a franc peg was over rated and curbed the development of Vietnam during a crucial period of demographic, social, and political crisis. This conclusion, although not new, permitted us to confirm what previously had been only hypothesis.
The same general findings were presented in Bui Lan Huong's paper, from an analysis of the foreign trade of Vietnam. She showed, once again, the importance of the general economic environment of Asia to Vietnam. This ultimately defeated all the attempts by the French to capture the Vietnamese economy long-term in a colonial system. Huong, after extensive gathering of data, showed us how the crisis of the early 1930's changed the structure of Vietnam's foreign trade. The deterioration in the terms of trade occurred only from the early 1930s, with a shift to export of non-primary commodities and an import substitution process.
The next periods studied carefully were those of the wars of independence, which lead to the division of the country. Four papers were devoted to this period. These were highly technical but this should not be off-putting to the researcher with no specialized knowledge of national accounts. Constantly referring to actual fact and data (production in the Viet Minh zone, labour force, industrial and agriculture production), they are models of procedure to understand the communist economy and allow comparison between the different (or similar) effects of different political systems on a country. The ultimate goal of the Asian Historical Statistics project being to convert data and GDP calculation into a SNA in order to allow comparisons, these papers are essential.
Three kinds of connection have to be built. The first is between the two political systems and their statistics; communist North and Nationalist South. The second is across time, through the gaps of 1954 and 1975, one due to the divided independence, the other to the reunification under a communist regime. The third is geographical, between the parts of the country that the Viet-Minh organised and ruled, and the zone controlled by legal authorities. Some areas remained in the hands of rebels from 1945, such as the largest part of Central Vietnam - Annam, or large parts of Cochinchina. The division of Vietnam did not begin only in 1954, but rather back in 1945-1946, just after Vietnam declared its independence from French domination.
The papers of Nguyen Quan and Severine Blaise stressed this point for two different periods and endeavoured to build tools to estimate production of each part, and allow comparison of the results. Tran Van Tho's work was a similar attempt and emphasised the question of labour force, while the paper of Vu Viet, even if it remained the more technical, provided a clear synthesis. All these papers were discussed at length, and Alexei Ponomarenko, of the Russian Statistics Office gave valuable explanations of the former Soviet system.
Until now, no "economic history" of "Vietnam" has ever been attempted, and it is therefore highly stimulating for a historian to participate in a project of this nature. Several works focussing on economic questions have been written previously, but with different goals or perspectives from those of the Asian Historical Statistic Project. They differ on two points, the space considered, and the concepts and tools used.
The first difference is the geographic base given to the research, namely the Vietnam of present day borders, for all the 20th century. Generally studies on the first half of the century consider "French Indochina", including Cambodia and Laos in their field, and not solely Vietnam. For the years of the "Divided Independence" (as Paul Isoart called these years in 1963) studies are limited to one of the halves of Vietnam, with methods and sources that are impossible to compare.
The most important difference remains in the meaning of the concept "economy". The most well known work in this field is that of Martin Murray's 1980 wark. But but while this proposed a certain number of interesting hypotheses, it gave more space for ideological preoccupations than to a comprehensive research of historical material. This work and others are focused on investment flows from the French metropolis, and their effect on the local society. Most of the historical works, especially works of synthesis, dealing with the history of Vietnam, show a large interest in economy. However the Marxist point of view of some often lead them to focus on the particularities of the Vietnamese revolution and the successive wars from this perspective, rather to analyse the economy itself. Most of the works on social economy and tend to describe the standard of life of Vietnamese peasants and plantation coolies with qualitative data.
These works remain in the field of "history of the economy", rather than "economic history", and use neither tools nor concepts of economics to process the materials of historians. This issue came up several times during the workshop. Daniel Hemery, one of the most outstanding Western historians of modern and contemporary Vietnam likes to say that an "historian might 'discover' his material". That means to not only find his material in the archives, but to learn to interrogate it and to manipulate it until it shows something. To historians, economists, with their assumption "Ceteris paribus", appear to be the most amazing conquistadors of vast continents of material.
Historians of Vietnam have criticised the sources (archives and published figures of all administrations). For the colonial period they are regarded as being unreliable and issued by an administration rather ignorant of the reality of Vietnam, unable to see across the screen of local native authorities. But the attitude of historians when faced with this data is ambivalent: reluctant to trust it, they hesitate even more to correct or recalculate it.
On the part of historians, the reluctance to rely on this material may stem from their general lack of technical knowledge to calculate data. The attitude seems to be that data is only considerd reliable or "accurate" if it is well-lined, without missing values, and signed by an official Bureau of Statistics (the reality being that such well done tables are often a mixture of precise figures and estimations).
It is difficult for scholars not accustomed to using calculation techniques to imagine that beyond the "raw" figures of foreign trade of Vietnam, import and export, further investigation could be aimed at estimating wholesale price series (implicit series for several hundred imported or exported items) or the the amount of services related to foreign trade, shipping, and insurance. Another example is that a systematic collection of import and export volume for non-primary goods could allow estimates for manufacturing, cottage industries outputs, and more broadly Vietnam's GDP, assuming constant price elasticity of the domestic demand for imported products. (Bassino & Bui)
This discomfort on the part of historians can be observed in the first three papers (delivered by Takada, Ta Thi Thuy, Giacometti) covering agriculture and focussing on rice cultivation. Due to the importance of rice production to the overall GDP of Vietnam, this required particular attention. The three papers remained rather historical, presenting the figures of area, yields and outputs of rice as they had been found in published sources from the colonial administration. However, the "estimation procedure" was rather weak, reduced to an attempt to cross check the printed data with others found in non-published archives (Giacometti). Indeed this sort of attempt can be fruitful, for example in the case of Annam, the figures for yield found for the middle of the 1930's confirmed the underestimation in the published data. But this underestimation was acknowledged during the colonial period. The issue was exposed by one part of the central administration and individuals, who repeatedly noted that the real surfaces and outputs for rice cultivation might be 25 to 30% higher than the figures reported by local administrations.
Here begins the domain of the historian who should explain the differences in views of various offices of the French colonial administration (for example the central Bureau of Statistics and the local Departments of Agriculture). More particularly, to explain why the local departments of agriculture continued to register and to publish figures universally known to be quite well below the reality. But even having clarified such questions, historians generally remain reluctant to readjust figures which have received an imprimatur, and even more so, to do it fifty four times, for all the years between 1900 and 1954.
One of the most intriguing papers was presented by Maks Banens, demographer. This dealt with the population of Vietnam during the twentieth century. It was based on an extensive bibliography and was brilliantly presented, with its findings clearly presented, even though the work required important technical skills.
Banens started his calculation on the most accurate sensus of population (1989), added the most reliable recorded figures on mortality and natality rates and then proposed hypotheses, both general to demography and specific to Vietnam. He compared his findings with sources from the turn of the century and the findings of other researchers also based on the 1989 census. Far from giving up on the task when faced with incoherent figures, or with censuses separated by too large gaps in time, he showed that a common corpus of documents i.e. historical materials could fruitfully be used by specialists of other social sciences. This type of research requires scientific work of great dedication and professionalism, but can produce the most remarkable inter-disciplinary result one can expect: findings settled enough to be accepted by other disciplines and to be used for other calculations, such as foodstuff consumption and estimations of production.
Confronted with his own findings, namely the drop in fertility rates in Vietnam during World War I and in the second part of the 1930's, Banens attributed the first drop to the sending of soldiers and workers from Vietnam to France, and to the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. However, no precise explanation appeared for the second drop. The available literature proposed some, emphasising the disturbance of the communal and social system of rural Vietnam that affected solidarities and village social protections such as the access to communal rice fields for the poorest. But they were given as general observations on the functioning of societies, without precise chronology or discussions of this specific effect on the population. The beginning of an answer to these historical and political questions concerning the disturbance of the Vietnamese society, its timing, its intensity and its effects, might perhaps have been found thanks to the demography.
The workshop on Vietnam clearly demonstrated how an undertaking such as the study of the economic history of a country cannot be anything other than multi-disciplinary. This multi-disciplinary aspect maybe difficult to manage, as each discipline must accept techniques and procedures of the others involved. But nonetheless it is this approach which allows us to discover new materials and generate new insights. The strength of the Asian Historical Statistics Project is founded on this genuinely multi-disciplinary nature.
(Hitotsubashi University, Institute of Economic Research)