Return to education in Vietnam during the recent transformation

Abstract

A common phenomenon about transition economies is that the return to schooling improves as economic reform progresses. Existing evidence suggests that Vietnam is not an exception to the pattern. However, the rate of return for the period 1992 to 1998 is still low relative to that of the world and of other transitional economies. To provide up-to-date estimates of the return and to test whether the return to schooling in Vietnam is rising and reaches other transitional economies’ rate of return, we re-examine the return in Vietnam from 1998 until before the current global economic crisis when the reforms have had a longer time to have an effect. We apply the OLS and Heckman selection estimators and find that the return has increased quickly during the later economic reform period but its pace has slowed down when the return reached the global average rate.