in October and December 1992. The last and decisive step was made in June 1993, when almost all prices were made free.

## V ietnam

In the past a dual price system of fixed official prices and free market prices was adopted. Under this system, the official prices guided production while free market prices were applied for production outside the plan. Later, in 1981 and 1985, price reform policy was implemented with limited results. After the narrowing of the price gap between official and market prices in 1987 and 1988, an almost complete price liberalization was carried out in 1989, with a few exceptions such as electricity, oil products, public transportation fares, and so on. It should be noted that the relative price between industrial and agricultural products moved in favor of the agricultural products.

## 3 -1-3 Public Enterprise Reform and Privatization

Public enterprise reform takes various forms depending on the conditions of each country. Various measures were taken to improve the efficiency of the public enterprises with mixed results. The basic trend in enterprises reform is to give more managerial autonomy to these enterprises. It should be emphasized that the increased autonomy should be accompanied by the enforcement of responsibility such as bankruptcy law to actually improve performance. Privatization is implemented using various schemes at various paces but with the exception of Mongolia, where a voucher scheme was effectively employed to privatize state enterprises and livestock, mass scale privatization was not conducted as in Russia and the Eastern European countries. Other countries preferred a slower process, and privatization has been more or less in experimental stage.

To sum up, in most countries the emphasis was on management rather than ownership. Considering the weak social and legal infrastructure, it is rather difficult to foresee that private ownership will immediately lead to improved performance of enterprises. Another important aspect of enterprise reform is the encouragement of new emerging industries. A typical example is the township and village enterprise in China.

## Cambodia

The government introduced a new system of financial autonomy of state owned enterprises in late 1989. Although the state-owned enterprises could retain all the proceeds after the tax and half of the their amortization is paid to the state in this system, government control on investment, price fixation and so on still remains. Privatization of state owned enterprises began in 1989. The government has placed great hopes on foreign investment as a provider of know-how and capital. Leasing has been the most popular method for privatization, and about half of the state-owned enterprises have already been leased to private companies. The fixed assets of enterprises are leased for periods 15 to 26 years. There were 69 state enterprises before the enforcement of the new policy. Currently, 35 factories have already been leased to private companies.

## China

The direction of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) reform in China is towards more autonomy. At first there were trials of giving more autonomy to management and profit distribution. Then, influenced by the agricultural household responsibility system, the product