I. A survey of statistical sources and previous works

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

    Geographical inequalities present the first stumbling block in researching historical statistics on Vietnam. The numbers are easier to find, more precise, and more plentiful for the regions which were more thoroughly controlled by the colonial administration. The series on population not only indicate with precision the sex and age of the individuals surveyed, but also their ethnic group. But in the large cities, Hanoi, Saigon and Cholon, the French administration relied upon data supplied by the leaders of the Chinese official communities for estimating their ethnic group, with considerable uncertainty in the case of Cholon. In several rural regions, however, especially in regions populated largely by ethnic minorities, the information clearly relates to the denser population of the towns, which is the only geographical area with which the colonial administration were familiar, thus one must therefore multiply by a coefficient to correct the data. The works of historical anthropology directed largely by the EFEO ( Ecole Française d' Extrême Orient ) allow the estimation of these coefficients for the different periods and regions. One may thus be able to determine that the low population estimates for the southern part of Cochinchina, if still valid, were exaggerated, at least for the late nineteenth century.

    Moreover, since the administrative reality dealt with Indochina as a unit, research on present - day Vietnam must often treat the archive series selectively. For public receipts and expenditures, for instance, one must evaluate the part of the Governor General's budget which applied to Vietnam, by separating out the part corresponding to Cambodia and Laos, or else one must simply estimate their share of public finance where the archives do not provide the appropriate answers. The situation is the same for foreign trade. The categories we know today did not exist ; Vietnam was divided into three regions : Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina. This is a well - known fact in the political arena, but it also had commercial ramifications. Thus, the rice exported from Cochinchina to Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan or France could have originated in Cambodia, and would only have passed briefly through southern Vietnam.

    One must also realise that the factors which influenced economic conditions were badly understood, or even unknown to the colonial administration. The issue of inflation offers a good example. Inflation was seen as a purely monetary phenomenon : a poor currency led to goods becoming expensive ; consequently, the maintenance of a healthy currency, ensuring the high quality of coinage and a strict policy for reserve rate, presented the solution to all cyclical problems. But the complex distribution of prerogatives did not facilitate the management of monetary aggregates. The Banque de l' Indochina, a private institution, held the monopoly on issuing coins and notes, but the right to mint coins belonged to the Hotel des Monnaies, in France, and remained bound by the Governor General's authorisation. Even the vocabulary was uncertain. The administrators from the beginning of the century did not always distinguish between forced currency and inconvertibility of notes. Their rigid rules for the circulation of currency also explain the differing exchange rates which were observable between Hanoi and Saigon, and even more so between Vietnam and Hong Kong.

    The search for macro - economic indicators such as wholesale and consumer prices, salaries and interest rates also confronts one with the normal difficulties linked to the heterogeneity of the economic situation. These numbers varied from one region to another because the economic realities differed from the town to the countryside, and especially from the north to the south of the country. In other words, the economic unification of the country was far from realised. It is known that several salaries were about twice as high in Saigon as in Hanoi in the 1920s. No doubt prices followed the same trends, but to what degree? Were price structures comparable? Which regions had the higher purchasing power? Salaries and market prices, inflation, transportation costs by road, rail and canal, land prices, are issues that remain less studied than the impact of the modern production sector on the traditional sector, or than the creation of a proletariat, within the colonial setting of southern plantations and northern mines.

    The same kind of gaps can be observed for the service sector. If researchers have easy access to the series which cover modern inland transport, such as the railroads, there is still little appraisal of the importance of shipping, which was largely in the hands of Vietnamese and Chinese ship owners. Yet, it contributed importantly to the unification of the internal market, demonstrating a micro - economic efficiency which partially explains the low levels of freight transport on the Hanoi - Saigon railroad. Again, it seems indispensable to evaluate the importance of porters, servants, prostitutes, and peddlers in the different periods, which will require an investigation of diverse and complementary sources : police reports, fiscal documents, travelogues, journals, inter alia.

    In a more general sense, researchers need to evaluate the contribution of the traditional sector to natives' income and thus to the monetization of the economy. Certainly, the standard of living for the rural population at the end of the nineteenth century was not very high. The crucial task, however, is to use works of historical anthropology to evaluate as precisely as possible the importance of personal consumption and its evolution in the first half of the twentieth century. For this rural income, statistics on foreign trade allow one to sense the importance of the production related to regional specialisation, such as Indochinese basketry and other related labour - intensive rural industries.

    In a parallel manner, the contribution of local capital to the development of the national economy seems to have been underestimated. Researchers have tended to have more interest in capital which originated in France, whether that capital was being invested in manufacturing, mining, transportation or agriculture. Investment by Vietnamese and Chinese economic agents has remained occluded. But, by using the official listing on mining concessions, we find that several of these French investors had in actual fact a Vietnamese or Chinese name. Private investment was indeed a very complicated story. We know that before WWI, several German investors used the names of French and Chinese local partners as official shareholders or managers of their businesses in order to make their activity more acceptable to the French administration. Foreign ( non - Chinese ) investment should not be neglected and this may shed new light on the appraisal of Vietnam's comparative advantages in non - agricultural production.

    This lacuna to be found within the usual sources, results from the weakness of the colonial administration's overall control and from the absence of a fiscal stake ; the explicit goal of the opium monopoly was to extract more revenue from the Chinese population than would have been possible with a tax on capital or on a commercial transaction. Nevertheless, there are indirect ways to evaluate domestic private capital formation. Whether one is looking at the Vietnamese, the Chinese or even the French in Indochina, it is absolutely necessary to research capital formation, research which has more hope of success than has been claimed up to now. In the archives of Ho Chi Minh City, for example, one can find valuable information on the investment capability of rich Vietnamese and Chinese, estimated by the General Government, in terms of the direct issuance of shares from the proposed Indochinese Shipping Company.

    Balance of payments should also be the object of particular study. As regards Indochina, one knows that the measurement of invisibles was almost impossible. It is even quite difficult to estimate the actual amount of French capital invested in Vietnam. There can be a large difference between the 'nominal capital', the 'called capital' and the 'real capital' of an enterprise, through manipulations of the founders' shares, the offered stock, or through only partially mobilising the nominal capital. Only through meticulous work might one obtain a realistic estimate of French capital actually invested. Similarly, contemporaries rarely tracked the flow of profits from Indochina to France, or even the savings which civil servants may have repatriated to metropolitan France or other colonies. Under these circumstances, it would be worth re - examining the hypothesis that Vietnam was an overall net exporter of capital during the period.

    Much unexpected information lies in archives both in France and in Vietnam. Only a few files refer directly to salaries. But one can find the salaries for plantation workers in the South, scribbled on a scrap of paper in a file on the stabilisation of the piastre, thus illustrating a possible concern for the implications of exchange rates policy on wages, purchasing power and competitiveness. Likewise, we have lost many of the prices of public works carried out by businesses on contract to the General Government. But price comparisons for different tasks submitted by competing companies turn up in unexpected files, such as the reparation of the offices managing the Indochinese Fleet. Systematic exploration and utilisation of this kind of information for direct and indirect estimates of missing values in time series will certainly be the task of the next generation of researchers on Vietnam's economic history ; but it would be advisable to begin this job as soon as possible.