Adjusted national income accounts of the Republic of Vietnam indicate that real income rose at an annual rate of about 4 percent per year from 1956 through 1974. Allowing for population change, this rate of growth would be 1.4 percent per year. To anyone familiar with national income accounting practices in underdeveloped countries, figures such as those quoted should be read with some skepticism. Hence, in the first part of this chapter there is an attempt to remove some of the preconditioned mistrust that a reader might have for our figures by discussing sources of error in the Vietnam national income accounts and making adjustments when they can be justified by other information. The second part of the chapter describes income growth over time and the contribution to growth by sector of origin.

3.1 Economic activity, 1956–72

We are interested in knowing how fast the South Vietnamese economy grew and how major sectors shared in that growth over the two decades ending in 1975. Our search for this knowledge and answers to other questions pertaining to national income was frustrated by known inadequacies in official Vietnamese national income data. At first it seems advisable to present alternative data sets on growth in order to establish a range of estimates that will seem reasonable to many readers. Here are three such sets: (1) The official statistics on gross national product (GNP) as compiled by the National Bank of Vietnam (NBVN).