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Like a number of other developing countries the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has deemed its pattern of settlement to be in need of radical intervention. This article analyzes the post-1975 population redistribution program in Vietnam. After examining the goals and instruments of the program it evaluates its demographic and geographic efficiency and its social and economic costs. Information on interprovincial migration flows derived from the daily reports of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service is analyzed separately for the periods before and after the Sixth Party Plenum (1979). Results indicate that the decongestion of Southern cities took place mainly in the 1st period that labor population movements served mostly to alleviate excessive demographic pressures in a few Northern provinces and that the outmovement of Southern urbanites to New Economic Zones (NEZs) had been largely offset by an influx of Northerners into Southern cities and by substantial return migration from the NEZs. (authors)
Jacqueline Desbarats (Sun,) studied this question.