100 Books Like Economic Reform and Employment Relations in Vietnam

This book gives an early perspective on Vietnam’s reforms and economic growth. It follows and complements a book by Le Dang Doanh published by the National Australian University in Australia in 1992 written from a similar perspective.

The book is based largely on Vietnamese early sources of data and information. It presents an analysis of the main features of economic policy reforms in Vietnam, their socioeconomic impact, and several major theoretical and practical problems Vietnam faced on its path to development.

For readers interested in a sectoral analysis of Vietnam’s reforms and economic growth, the book provides a useful account of one major area of reform in Vietnam, namely education.

Coupled with domestic training and foreign capital inflows, this education sector and its reforms can be said to be a principal contributor to the country’s development and growth. The book also discusses the reform’s rationale and issues and, for policy analysis, describes the consequences for the sector and the economy in recent years.

This is a useful book to understand the basic problems and achievements of a socialist country’s move towards a globalized and free market system.

This book is a version of the authors’ previous work published by the South East Asia Institute. As a contribution to the specific theme, it first provides a description of Vietnam’s reforms and development. It also discusses a number of special features of this policy, including outcomes, pro and con analysis, and obstacles. 

To me, the book represents a pioneering landmark work on Vietnam’s epoch-making macroeconomic policy.

It is a very early study by an internationally distinguished economist and ministerial official on Vietnam’s reforms and development. The book covers the major and important problems and issues that existed in the beginning of the Doi Moi opening up policy in 1987. Significantly, these problems and issues still persist today in policy analysis and contemporary scholarly studies.

This book captures the decline of the traditional job—stable, well-paid, with a good chance of moving up—between World War II and the end of the 20th century. Wartzman is a clear, engaging writer who tells gripping stories about workers, bosses, chief executives, and politicians to explain what the old “social contract” between big companies and American society was, and why it disappeared. But he’s also particularly good at not overly romanticizing the earlier era, when huge swaths of people—like women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, and others—were cut out of the workforce by prejudice and racism. This book makes business and labor history engaging and entertaining, even while it will make you mad about how bad things have become.

Nigeria’s most famous economist and the current Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Okonjo-Iweala is a formidable figure nationally and globally. Her memoir about her time as Finance Minister during the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo (in office 1999-2007) gives insight into debt relief negotiations and major economic reforms. Those reforms look less transformative in retrospect – at least 40% of Nigerians remain mired in poverty, and Nigeria’s debt has climbed again, including during Okonjo-Iweala’s second stint as Finance Minister – but the memoir remains important for understanding Africa’s largest economy.

Since the days of Ronald Regan, trickle-down economic theory has been a pipe dream of the uneducated and I don’t even have a degree. Mark Mattern does a great job inverting the theory of trickle-down in explaining that indeed wealth piles from the bottom up not drip down from the top. I recommend reading this book before you read mine for the simple fact that instead of inverted trickle-down theory, I describe how water moves like a stream through an ecosystem. If it is not properly pitched from the mountaintop to the valley, with proper displacement of creatures below, and flow rate through the foothills, we are inevitably left dependent on drinking from a wasteland.

This is one of my all-time favorite books! It was given to me by my nephew Kareem, in 2018. I have read it cover to cover, twice. My handwritten notes are on over 50% of the pages. 

The research that Baradarian put into this book is unparalleled. The book is chockful of facts and data that I never knew about Black history. For example, her research uncovered the fact that the forty acres of land that were to go to the 4 million formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War was to be sold, not given to Blacks at $1.25 per acre. 

This book is filled with an abundance of typically unknown data, as she admirably tells the history of Blacks in America, through the Black banking industry’s chronicles. 

In the spirit of full transparency, my love for this book preceded the 2019 interview that I did of Baradarian… show more.

The monuments we see when we visit Rome were constructed under the emperors. But Rome was already a great metropolis before they began work, one that was architecturally unique and built on a scale to dwarf most ancient cities. What this book does is reconstruct the great building projects of the Republic, beginning with the original fourth-century walls of Rome and the first aqueducts. It asks (and answers) questions like: Where did they get the stone? Who provided the labour? How long did it take them? And what technologies did they use? This was a Rome built without marble, without concrete, and not a royal foundation, but one managed by generations of magistrates riding the wave of a slow economic boom. Completely fascinating.

The impact of entrepreneurship on society is clearly of great interest to the author, an economist at Indiana University. Often contrasting Europe, where Dr. Audretsch has spent a considerable amount of time, with his native United States, the author explores the socioeconomic implications of America’s transition from a job-for-life society to The Entrepreneurial Society. 

For example, he explains that the entrepreneurial thrust in American business and academia in the late 20th century/early 21st century have generated an impressive job-creating engine, especially in contrast to the relatively stagnant job growth in most of Europe. The Entrepreneurial Society stands as an important discussion about the impact of entrepreneurship on 21st-century society and the book’s transatlantic scope makes it particularly interesting.