100 Books Like The Political Economy of Education Reforms 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.

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. 

For readers interested in sectoral analysis and especially labour studies, the book discusses the transformation of employment relations in Vietnam since Doi Moi in 1987. These relations have been a key part of Vietnam’s reforms and a necessary pre-condition to the country’s long-awaited WTO membership in 2007.

The book first examines the nature of employment reforms, analyses the motivation behind new policy initiatives, and then examines the detail of reforms in a range of business enterprises. The book’s sources of information are based on extensive original research.

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.

I strongly recommend this book because it is clearly written, explains the methods of estimation, and provides an excellent overview of the extensive worldwide research on the returns to education based on earnings.

It certainly influenced me. It had a massive impact on World Bank lending policies in support of economic development in developing countries. It replaced the kinds of Bank physical capital investment policies such as those supporting dam construction, projects that included educating only for a few people on how to operate dams, with education sector-wide loans that support primary and junior secondary education of the labor force.

Some of these dams later washed out, and forests were destroyed in support of development. The book shows how the returns to investment in primary and secondary education are higher in developing countries where the labor force is often nearly illiterate than they are to investing in other higher levels… show more.

This book provides a thorough treatment of all the basic economic tools that everyone needs to survive and thrive in today’s world. 

Stock is a natural teacher who uses her gift for taking the complex and making it simple. The topics are wide-ranging and the analysis is clear and convincing. Even those who think they are not interested in economics will find something to take with them after pursuing this well-written volume.

I recommend this collection of articles because it gives a readable and clear view of the connection of the benefits of education to education finance and brings in for the first time the distribution of both the benefits and the costs of education.

Kern Alexander is well known as the father of equity as it relates to education and education finance. His article on the “Concept of Equity in School Finance” which is Chapter 10 in his book sets the stage for 9 additional articles that follow on essentially all of the key aspects of distribution of the benefits among children and families and of costs among families and taxpayers. 

This follows the nine Chapters on economic efficiency in education, which explore in greater depth many of the aspects already introduced above. These include the “Human Capital Approach” by Theodore W. Schultz, “The Social and Economic Externalities of Education”, “The… show more.

I love this book because it takes what we largely take for granted—local property tax and the educational inequality it produces—and shows how and why this developed over time and whose interests it has served. While we have tended to assume that funding inequality is the unfortunate byproduct of a long attachment to localism, this book explores how, in California, the state moved from centralized and more equitable funding to more localized and unequal funding through the political lobbying of the elites who benefited.

Taking unequal funding seriously as a deliberate project and a cornerstone for other kinds of social and economic inequalities makes us rethink many aspects of educational inequality we live with today. This book consequently says profound things about the history of American education and educational inequality, past and present.

To understand why some workers are paid more than others, you have to understand how skills are valued and rewarded in the labor market, and how that has changed, as the economy has evolved.

Focused on the United States, Katz and Goldin provide a sweeping overview of how education leads to skills and income, drawing on the most well-established theories in economics. It misses some important causes of inequality, but is essential for understanding the one of the deepest economic forces governing wages: the supply and demand of human capital.

Davies offers an exceptionally clear and useful definition of neoliberalism: “the disenchantment of politics by economics.” But what really makes this book valuable is the research he has conducted on the office culture of the government officials who are actually implementing neoliberal policy—how they think, what they believe they’re achieving, and how they sometimes deviate from the letter of neoliberal theory while remaining true to its spirit.