page_title: Lê Duẩn
section_title: Economy
hierarchical_section_title: Lê Duẩn / General Secretary leadership / Economy
caption_attribution_description: Tiếng Việt: Tốc độ tăng trưởng thu nhập quốc dân thực tế hàng năm (dựa theo giá so sánh 1982) của nền kinh tế và các ngành lớn. Đơn vi: phần trăm. Nguồn số liệu để vẽ hình này là Bảng 7.1 trang 293 trong Trần Văn Thọ chủ biên (2000), Kinh tế Việt nam 1955-2000: Tính toán mới, phân tích mới, Nhà xuất bản Thống kê, Hà Nội.
context_page_description: Lê Duẩn was a Vietnamese communist politician. He rose in the party hierarchy in the late 1950s and became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam at the 3rd National Congress in 1960. He continued Hồ Chí Minh's policy of ruling through collective leadership. From the mid-1960s until his own death in 1986, he was the top decision-maker in Vietnam.
  He was born into a lower-class family in Quảng Trị Province, in the southern part of French Indochina as Lê Văn Nhuận. Little is known about his family and childhood. He first came in contact with revolutionary thoughts in the 1920s through his work as a railway clerk. Lê Duẩn was a founding member of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930. He was imprisoned in 1931 and released in 1937. From 1937 to 1939, he climbed the party ladder. He was rearrested in 1939, this time for fomenting an uprising in the South. Lê Duẩn was released from jail following the successful Communist-led August Revolution of August 1945.
  During the First Indochina War, Lê Duẩn was an active revolutionary leader in South Vietnam. He headed the Central Office of South Vietnam, a Party organ, from 1951 until 1954.
context_section_description: Vietnam developed little during the war years; industry was nearly non-existent in both North and South and both countries were dependent on foreign donor countries. Worse, the country's critical agricultural infrastructure had been badly damaged. The South had roughly 20,000 bomb craters, 10 million refugees, 362,000 war invalids, 1,000,000 widows, 880,000 orphans, 250,000 drug addicts, 300,000 prostitutes and 3 million unemployed.
  Having won the war and defeated South Vietnam, Lê Duẩn's mood in April 1975 was optimistic.  As one Central Committee member put it, "Now nothing more can happen. The problems we face now are trifles compared to those in the past." Lê Duẩn promised the Vietnamese people in 1976 that each family would own a radio set, refrigerator and TV within ten years; he seemed to believe he could easily integrate the South Vietnamese consumer society with agrarian North Vietnam. In 1976 the 4th National Congress declared Vietnam would complete its socialist transformation within twenty years. This optimism proved unfounded; instead Vietnam staggered from one economic crisis to another.
  After the war, per-capita income stood at US$101; it decreased to $91 in 1980 and then increased to $99 by 1982, according to United Nations figures. Phạm Văn Đồng admitted that per-capita income "had not increased compared to what it was ten years ago". Physical health declined and malnutrition increased under Lê Duẩn, according to the Ministry of Health. According to the International Herald Tribune, an estimated 6,000,000 Vietnamese were suffering from malnutrition, leading the government to request aid from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Lê Duẩn's policies led to an abrupt decline in the standard of living; monthly per capita income in the North declined from $82 in 1976 to $58 in 1980.
  The main goals of the Second Five-Year Plan (1976–80), which was initiated at the 4th National Congress, were as follows;
  "Concentrate the forces of the whole country to achieve a leap forward in agriculture; vigorously develop light industry".
  "[T]urn to full account existing heavy industry capacity and build many new industrial installations, especially in the machine industry, so as to support primary agriculture and light industry".
  "[V]irtually complete socialist transformation in the South".
  The Vietnamese leadership expected to reach these targets with economic aid from the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and loans from international agencies of the capitalist world. The 4th National Congress made it clear that agriculture would be socialised; however, during the Second Five-Year Plan the socialisation measures went so badly that Võ Chí Công, a Politburo member and Chairman of the Committee for the Socialist Transformation of Agriculture, claimed it would be impossible to meet the targets set by the plan by 1980. An estimated 10,000 out of 13,246 socialist cooperatives, established during the plan, had collapsed in the South by 1980. Politburo member Lê Thanh Nghị attacked lower-level cadres for the failure of the socialist agriculture transformation. The collectivisation process led to an abrupt drop in food production in 1977 and 1978, leading the 6th Plenum of the Central Committee to completely overhaul the Party's agricultural policies.
  With regard to heavy industry, the leadership's position was muddled. In his Fourth Political Report Lê Duẩn stated that during the transition to socialism, priority would be given to heavy industry "on the basis of developing agriculture and light industry". In another section of the report, Lê Duẩn stated that light industry would be prioritised ahead of heavy industry. The position of Phạm Văn Đồng, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers (the head of government), was just as confused as Lê Duẩn's. In practice Lê Duẩn prioritised heavy industry: 21.4% of state investment was in heavy industry in the Second Five-Year Plan and 29.7 percent in the Third Five-Year Plan (1981–85). Light industry only received 10.5 and 11.5, respectively. From 1976 to 1978
caption: Real national income growth in Vietnam from 1976 until 1985
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