Activity
In 1993 he was invited to be a member of an economic body advising Vietnamese Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet. Later he was on a policy research team under Kiet’s successor Phan Van Khai. It was then that he called for eliminating paperwork and bureaucracy, recruiting state officials on merit, setting up a level playing ground for foreign and domestic investors and for private and state-owned enterprises. He also advised the government to compile a “negative list” with entrepreneurs allowed to involve in any activity not finding a place in it. He also criticized the indiscriminate award of doctorates which, thus, held little value. Calling for the revocation of a regulation prohibiting Communist Party members from doing business, he said officials should be allowed to open private companies and engage in business. This has since been seriously considered.
In 1997 he published a book in Vietnamese, Industrializing Vietnam in the Age of the Asia-Pacific, and again in 2005, East Asian Economic Upheavals and the Road to Industrialization for Vietnam.In 2003 the Japan Bank for International Cooperation invited him to be the head of its ODA project assessment committee for developing infrastructure in northern Vietnam. Tho initiated the founding of the Vietnam Asia-Pacific Economic Center in Vietnam of which he is now chairman.
He retains his Vietnamese citizenship. Even in the desperate times soon after the war he refused to consider Japanese citizenship, which would have brought him plenty of benefits.
Read more about this topic: Tran Van Tho
Famous quotes containing the word activity:
“Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a “work” of man.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Genghis Khan, in his usual jodhpurs accessorized with whip, straddled a canvas chair and gloated upon the fairyland he had built. Journalists, photographers, secretaries, sycophants, script girls, and set dressers milled and stirred around him, activity ... irresistibly reminiscent of the movement of maggots upon rotting meat.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)