Estimating long term economic statistics of Vietnam under French rule(1895-1954); on sources and methods *

Abstract

This paper proposes a survey of sources and works on Vietnam's historical statistics available in the different specialised libraries and archives, mainly in Vietnam and France, and investigates methods to be implemented for estimating Vietnam's national accounts under French rule ( 1895-1954 ). While most of the sources on the period are related to former French Indochina, our aim is to produce time series corresponding to present day Vietnam. This task constitutes a first step toward a quantitative appraisal of Vietnam's economic dynamics from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Due to the weakness of the French administration, especially in Annam and Tonkin, few data were collected before 1893. For this reason, we will not consider here the first colonial period, French military occupation and administration of Cochinchina and further invasion of Annam and Tonkin.

Contents

• Introduction

• Part I. A survey of statistical sources and previous works
  1. The geographic dispersal of public and private sources, offsetting their abundance and accessibility.

  2. Imprecisions and lacunae linked to Vietnam's institutional and economic characteristics

  3. Imperfections of the statistical system and political biases.

  4. Brief presetation of previous works on Vietnam's economic statistics and quantitative history

• Part II. Methods for estimating Vietnam's national accounts
  1. The purpose and scope of the research

  2. Evaluation of the availability and reliability of data and proposed procedures allowed to overcome the imperfections and lacunae
     1. Population

     2. Primary sector : agriculture, fishing, forestry and hunting

     3. Mining and manufacturing

     4. Services

     5. Consumption

     6. Capital Formation

     7. Prices and Wages

     8. Public finance

     9. International trade

     10. Exchange rates, capital flows and balance of payments

• Conclusion

• References

  General references

  Anonymous articles published in journals and reviews

  Official reports and reports by semi-official committees

  Econimic statistics, administrative yearbooks or other official publications

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* An earlier and shorter version of this discussion paper was published in the Newsletter of the Asian Historical Statistics Project ( October 1997 ). We are indebted to Kyoji Fukao, Charles Mac Donald, Jacques Marseille, Konosuke Odaka, Pham Gia Ben, Osamu Saito and Trinh Van Tho for their comments and suggestions, and to Erica Peters, Charles Weathers and Sean Cassidy for editorial assistance. All remaining errors and omissions are ours. Financial research support by the AHSTAT COE Project and also, at an earlier stage, by the Paul Valer University Research Found and The French Ministry for the Foreign Affairs is gratefully acknowledged.