Project Staff

Tran Quang Anh
PhD researcher
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E-mail	qtran@fmg.uva.nl
Title PhD research: *Government policy and agricultural development in Vietnam and Tanzania: a case study of the coffee sector, 1985-2005.* Summary: Tran, a sociologist by training, aims to gain insight into the reasons for the economic divergence between Vietnam and Tanzania since the 1980s by looking at one sector of the economy, coffee, which illustrates that divergence in a spectacular way. Over the last 25 years Vietnam's coffee production in has increased a hundredfold, making it the second largest coffee producer in the world after Brazil. During the same period, coffee production in Tanzania has fallen by a third. Tran's fieldwork over the last six months in Vietnam has concentrated in following the 'value chain' of coffee from farmer to exporter, and examining the influence of state policy at each stage in the process. State-owned coffee processing, trading and exporting enterprises continue to play a major role in the industry alongside, and partly in competition with, a strong private sector. State-owned companies have even formed successful joint ventures with foreign investors. In Vietnam's 'socialist-oriented market economy', the state is less a central regulating authority than a very large but administratively decentralized institutional investor and entrepreneur. In Tanzania, by contrast, it appears that the state has retained an important regulatory role in the coffee industry while doing little to promote investment or entrepreneurship. This contrast may well be a good model for the divergent roles of the state in the Vietnamese and Tanzanian economies more generally. Fieldwork in Tanzania later this year will clarify the picture.