The Challenge of Reform in Indochina

Since the mid-1980s, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have been engaged in increasingly comprehensive market economic reforms: Laos with considerable support from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; Vietnam while still facing a US embargo; and Cambodia with the ever-present Khmer Rouge threatening to derail the fragile peace accord reached in Paris in the Fall of 1991. When the reforms began, all three countries were close allies of the Soviet Union. Today, Vietnam and Laos are linked as observers to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), originally created by its neighbours in order to contain communism.