Poverty In Vietnam Research Articles

Impact of cigarette price increase on health and financing outcomes in Vietnam.

Background: Vietnam had about 15 million male smokers in 2015. To reduce adult tobacco use in Vietnam through an increase in the excise tax of cigarettes, we conducted an extended cost-effectiveness analysis to examine the impact of two scenarios of cigarette price increases. Methods: We estimated, across income quintiles, the life-years gained, treatment cost averted, number of men avoiding catastrophic health expenditure and extreme poverty, and additional tax revenue under a 32% and a 62% increase in cigarette price through increased excise tax. We considered only male smokers as they constitute majority of the smokers. We used the average price elasticity of demand for cigarettes in Vietnam of -0.53. Results: Under both scenarios of price increase, men in the poorest quintile would gain about 2.8 times the life-years and avert 2.5 times the treatment cost averted by the richest quintile. With a 32% price increase, about 285,000 men would avoid catastrophic health expenditure; as a result, about 95,000 men, more than half of whom in the poorest quintile, would avoid falling into extreme poverty. In contrast to the distribution of health benefits, the extra revenue generated from men in the richest quintile would be 1.2 times that from the poorest quintile. With a 62% price increase, about 553,000 men would avoid catastrophic health expenditure, and about 183,000 men, more than half of whom in the poorest quintile, would avoid falling into extreme poverty. The extra revenue generated from men in the richest quintile would be 3.8 times that from the poorest quintile. Conclusions: Higher cigarette prices would particularly benefit the poorest income quintile of Vietnamese, in terms of health and financial outcomes. Thus, tobacco taxes are an effective way to improve health and reduce poverty in Vietnam.

Exposure to Floods, Climate Change, and Poverty in Vietnam

With 70% of its population living in coastal areas and low-lying deltas, Vietnam is highly exposed to riverine and coastal flooding. This paper conducts a “stress-test” and examines the exposure of the population and poor people in particular to current and future flooding in Vietnam and specifically in Ho Chi Minh City. We develop new high-resolution flood hazard maps at 90 m horizontal resolution, and combine this with spatially-explicit socioeconomic data on poverty at the country and city level, two datasets often kept separate. The national-level analysis finds that a third of today’s population is already exposed to a flood, which occurs once every 25 years, assuming no protection. For the same return period flood under current socioeconomic conditions, climate change may increase the number exposed to 38 to 46% of the population (an increase of 13–27% above current exposure), depending on the severity of sea level rise. While poor districts are not found to be more exposed to floods at the national level, the city-level analysis of Ho Chi Minh City provides evidence that slum areas are more exposed than other urban areas. The results of this paper provide an estimate of the potential exposure under climate change, including for poor people, and can provide input on where to locate future investments in flood risk management.

Urban poverty across the spectrum of Vietnam’s towns and cities

Abstract Vietnam’s urban population is growing rapidly: by 2020 45% of Vietnamese are forecasted to be residing in cities. Even though poverty today remains predominantly a rural phenomenon, there is a need to better understand the landscape of poverty in urban areas. Drawing on small-area estimation methods we estimate welfare outcomes at the level of individual towns and cities in Vietnam, including even the smallest towns. Such estimates could not be produced using national sample surveys alone. Results show an inverse relationship between poverty and city size in Vietnam, with the urban poor being disproportionately concentrated in small towns and cities. This relationship is robust to the location of the poverty line as well as to alternative city-size definitions. Interestingly, our evidence of a clear gradient between absolute poverty and city size is not replicated for subjective welfare, measured by self-reported food sufficiency. The absolute poverty-city size gradient does, however, accord with the observation of striking variation in service availability across cities of different size in Vietnam. Small town residents are typically confronted with far lower per-capita availability of basic services than are large city dwellers. The results suggest that policymakers concerned to tackle urban poverty in Vietnam should not neglect attending to smaller towns. Addressing inequalities in access to key basic services across the entire urban population may represent one means to this end.

Household vulnerability as expected poverty in Vietnam

Vulnerability and poverty are distinct yet highly correlated. Using data sets extracted from Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys for 2002, 2004 and 2006, this study analyzes vulnerability as expected poverty in Vietnam and becomes the first to adopt the reference line in a vulnerability measure, along with cross-sectional data. This study estimates the extent of vulnerability and analyses who the vulnerable are. In addition, this study investigates the link between dynamic poverty and vulnerability, something which has rarely been done. The results reveal that, (i) vulnerability estimated using the reference line is more appropriate than when estimated using the actual poverty line for poverty prediction in the case of Vietnam; (ii)ex ante vulnerability in previous periods might translate to ex post poverty in the following periods though both vulnerability and the incidence of poverty tend to fall over time; (iii) the vulnerability of the poor may trap them in poverty; and (iv) the vulnerability of the non-poor could propel them into poverty.

Economic growth, inequality, and poverty in Vietnam

This study examines how poverty reduction has been associated with economic growth and inequality in Vietnam. It finds that although the speed of poverty reduction was lower in the 2000s than in the 1990s, economic growth was more pro‐poor in the latter period. During the 1993–98 period, expenditure inequality increased and the poverty reduction during this period was mainly caused by economic growth. During the 2004–08 period, however, expenditure inequality decreased, thereby contributing to poverty reduction. The poverty incidence declined by around 5 percentage points, of which expenditure growth and redistribution contributed 2.8 and 2.2 percentage points of poverty reduction, respectively.

Nonfarm Activities and Household Production Choices in Smallholder Agriculture in Vietnam

Nonfarm Activities and Household Production Choices in Smallholder Agriculture in Vietnam

Disaster Resilience of Low-cost Houses: Case Study of Thua Thien Hue Province, Vietnam

This research documents the post-flood and typhoon conditions of low income housing in the Thua Thien Hue Province, Vietnam, an area prone to extreme flooding in Central Vietnam. The cost of rebuilding houses after a natural hazard has been always a burden for low income households and it often led to the elimination of essential construction practices for disaster resistance. While there has been remarkable improvement in relief and rehabilitation, poor people have been disproportionately vulnerable to extreme events due to their low adaptive capacity and suffered the same damages every year. The research documents existing conditions of low income houses in the Thua Thien Hue province and identifies leading causes of the building failure from the natural disasters. The quality of construction and repairs are assessed based on Coastal Construction Manual and by Federal Emergency Management Agency. In order to examine people's perception toward housing reinforcement as a coping strategy as well as to identify problems and issues associated with achieving stronger and safer housing, focus group and individual interviews were conducted with local residents from four different flood and typhoon-prone communities. The research found that many households in the affected areas now realize the importance of improving housing structures as a coping strategy to resist the impacts of floods and typhoons, however due to low income and a lack of professional instruction and technical guidance in the area, many households still reside in weak and fragile housing conditions that cannot withstand climate related risks. In particular, low-income households spend a considerable amount of their income on housing repair every year. Consultation and communication with professionals about building a resilient housing is lacking. Given that the major immediate recovery action taken by the local people tends to focus on repairing damaged houses, providing proper and applicable construction practices is crucial to improve the housing condition, but also to contribute to reduce poverty in Vietnam.

The Impacts of Trade Liberalization on Poverty in Vietnam

The study examines the effect of trade liberalization on poverty reduction across 60 provinces in Vietnam over a decade from 2002 to 2012 using fixed effects approach. In this study, trade liberalization is proxied by tariff exposure, which is constructed by combining information on geographic variation in the sector composition of the economy and temporal variation in tariff lines by product category. This yields a measure indicating how changes in exposure to tariff reductions vary by geographic area over the period 2002 and 2012. Taking advantage of the available multi-province and six-year dataset, the study includes a set of fixed effects: the province-fixed effects, which capture potential unobservable characteristics that are likely to affect poverty reduction, such as historical and institutional factors; and the time-fixed effects, which controls for aggregate time trend. The results indicate the statistically significant and positive correlation between tariff exposure and poverty, showing that exposure to trade liberalization is associated with poverty reduction and provinces being relatively more exposed to trade liberalization have experienced a stronger reduction in poverty. It is also found that tariff reductions have contributed to the reduction of the depth and severity of poverty in Vietnam. The results are robust to specification and controlling for region dummies and provincial characteristics. While there have been a limited number of studies on the relation between trade liberalization and poverty, poverty gap and poverty severity, the study is expected to make an empirical contribution to the literature of trade liberalization as well as development economics.

Regional Labor Market Integration, Shadow Wages and Poverty in Vietnam

Poor workers suffer from low returns to their most abundant resource, labor. In this paper we show that labor market integration strongly affects these returns for poor workers in Vietnam. Using seven representative household surveys, it is shown that while regional labor markets have become increasingly integrated over the period 1993–2010 considering market wages of workers in wage employment, there remains a strong lack of integration considering shadow wages of workers in farm self-employment. Shadow wages have been increasing as a proportion of market wages during 1993–2010, but they remain only 22–28% of rural market wages by 2010. Using a decomposition technique, it is shown that the lack of integration between the farm self-employment segment with various segments of wage employment (regional, urban versus rural, non-farm household versus other enterprises), explains primarily the gap in returns to labor between poor and non-poor workers. These findings show that labor market integration studies should not only focus on observed market wages but also on shadow wages in order to understand the relationship between labor market integration and the returns to labor.

Mental health, life functioning and risk factors among people exposed to frequent natural disasters and chronic poverty in Vietnam.

BackgroundPeople living in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) are at increased risk for exposure to major natural disasters, which places them at increased risk for mental health problems. Evidence is less clear, however, regarding the effects of less severe but more frequent natural disasters, which are likely to increase due to global climate change.AimsTo examine the mental health and life functioning, and their predictors, of people living in central coastal Vietnam – an area characterised by high risk for natural disasters and poverty.MethodOne thousand individuals were randomly selected from five provinces in central coastal Vietnam. Individuals were assessed cross-sectionally for exposure to major storms and other traumatic events (Post-traumatic Diagnostic Scale, or PDS), financial stress (Chronic Financial Stress Scale), depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (PDS), somatic syndrome (SCL-90-R), alcohol dependence (ICD-10), self-perceived general physical health (SF-36), and functional impairment (PDS life functioning section); caseness was determined using the various measures’ algorithms.Results22.7% of the sample (n=227) met caseness criteria in one or more mental health domains, and 22.1% (n=221) reported moderate to severe functional impairment. Lifetime exposure to typhoons and other major storms was 99% (n=978), with 77% (n=742) reporting traumatic major storm exposure. Moderate to high levels of financial stress were reported by 30% (n=297). Frequency of exposure to major storms was not associated with increased risk for mental health problems but traumatic exposure to a major storm was. Overall, the strongest predictor of mental health problems was financial stress. Number of traumatic typhoons and other major storms in turn were significant predictors (r2=0.03) of financial stress. The primary predictor of alcohol dependence was male gender, highlighting the importance of gender roles in development of alcohol abuse in countries like Vietnam.ConclusionsIndividuals living in central coastal Vietnam have elevated rates of PTSD, somatic syndrome, and functional impairment but not depression or anxiety. Financial stress was the strongest predictor of mental health problems. Results suggest the importance of conducting broad assessments when providing mental health support for disaster-impacted communities. Study results suggest that one indirect consequence of predicted global climate change may be increased prevalence of mental health problems in communities such as that assessed in the present study, due to increased risk for traumatic storm-related exposure and through indirect effects on financial stress, but not through a general increased risk for major storms. Such results also indicate that when supporting LMIC communities that have experienced natural disasters, it will be important to consider the broader community context including poverty, in addition to the direct effects of the disaster.Declaration of interestNone.Copyright and usage© The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2016. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

The Poverty and Welfare Effects of the 2008 Food Price Crisis in Vietnam: A Decomposition Analysis

Using panel data from the Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys (VHLSS), this paper examines the impacts of food price increases on welfare and poverty in Vietnam. It is found that on average the rise in food prices increased household welfare by 7.5 percentage points. However, the percentage of households who gained from the increase in food prices is much smaller than of those who lost. The absolute number of people living in poverty increased by about 2.5 percentage points and the poverty gap deepened, but these effects varied greatly across regions. Producers' supply reactions were moderate and on the demand side only poor consumers showed strong reactions.

Water for forests to restore environmental services and alleviate poverty in Vietnam: A farm modeling approach to analyze alternative PES programs

Most forested areas in South East Asia are located in mountainous areas, where they are reservoirs of biodiversity and have important watershed regulating functions. However, the continuing provision of these environmental services may be jeopardized by land use changes.To re-establish natural or productive forests, programs are being proposed in which participating farmers can set aside some of their cultivated sloping land and receive payment for maintaining the newly forested land. This paper compares two types of payments for ecosystems services (or PES)-type programs designed to favor reforestation by farming households: “Payments for forests” (PFF) and “Terraces for forests” (TFF). Both programs involve setting aside sloping land for reforestation but differ in the type and amount of compensation offered. PFF offers annual payments per area of retired land. TFF offers to cover the cost of converting a certain amount of a farm's sloping land into terraces, combined with annual payments per unit area of retired land.The main objective of the paper is to compare the two types of programs in terms of cost-efficiency – can we get the same amount of forest at lower cost? – and equity – will the poorest farmers participate?Using mathematical programming, we developed a set of farm models corresponding to typical farms in a mountainous district in Northern Vietnam. We simulated participation rates of different types of farms in the two types of PES programs. For each PES, we assessed the amount of land converted into forest, the cost of the program, and its impacts on land use and household revenues, at individual farm and village level.Results of our simulations showed that increasing access to irrigated terraces as a way of compensating for converting land to forest increased the participation of the poorest farmers and was more cost efficient than pure cash payments. This suggests that existing PFF programs are biased against the smallest landholders in the region whereas they could be transformed into win–win programs likely to increase forested areas and reduce inequalities among farm households. Our paper demonstrates that PES schemes, when fine-tuned to the South East Asian context, could not only be used to restore ecosystem services, but also to alleviate poverty.

Multidimensional Child Poverty in Vietnam from a Longitudinal Perspective—Improved Lives or Impoverished Conditions?

Despite a rapid expansion of the bodies of research on the measurement of multidimensional poverty, chronic poverty and child poverty, little attention has been paid to the longitudinal aspects of multidimensional poverty. Even less evidence is available about longitudinal multidimensional child poverty. This paper combines these strands of research, using household survey data from 2004, 2006 and 2008 from Vietnam to analyze cross-sectional poverty trends and longitudinal poverty dynamics. The purpose of this study is three-fold as it (i) examines the lives of children in Vietnam and considers changes in their living conditions in the first decade of the 21st century; (ii) assesses various hypotheses drawn from the chronic multidimensional poverty literature; and (iii) presents an explorative study of the investigation of child poverty from a longitudinal perspective using a multidimensional approach. Main conclusions suggest that the large reduction of child poverty in Vietnam has been unequal and that a sizeable proportion of children remain locked into poverty. Theoretically, this paper finds that characteristics of chronic versus transient poor children are similar and that the association between poverty depth and duration is not strong enough to consider one measure a proxy for the other.

Urban poverty in Vietnam: determinants and policy implications

PurposeThe objective of the paper is to examine the profile and determinants of urban poverty in the two largest cities in Vietnam – Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh. The paper also investigates the dynamic aspect of urban poverty in Vietnam.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use regression and data from the 2009 Urban Poverty Survey to examine the determinants of poverty in Vietnam. To analyse the poverty dynamics, an approach by Carter and May is used to decompose poverty into structural and stochastic poverty.FindingsUsing the poverty line of 12,000 thousand VND/person/year, the poverty incidence is estimated at 17.4 percent for Hanoi and 12.5 percent for Ho Chi Minh (HCM) City. There is a large proportion of the poor who are found stochastically poor. Hanoi has higher rates of structural poverty than HCM City. The proportion of structurally poor and stochastically non‐poor is rather small. Overall, the poor have fewer assets than the non‐poor. The poor also have poorer housing conditions, especially substantially lower access to tap water than the non‐poor. Heads of the poor households tend to have lower education and unskilled work than the heads of the non‐poor households.Originality/valueIn cities of Vietnam, a large proportion of the poor are found stochastically poor.

The Impact of Social Security on Household Welfare: Evidence from a Transition Country

Although there is no doubt that social security can help poverty reduction, its effect on poverty reduction can vary for different situations. This article uses fixed effects regression to estimate the effect of social security transfers including contributory pensions and social allowances on the consumption expenditure of the receiving households in Vietnam. The article also investigates the effect of social security transfers on poverty in Vietnam. It is found that both pensions and social allowances increase expenditure of households, especially expenditure on nonfood consumption. Pensions and social allowances reduce poverty of both the recipients and the whole population.

Examination of existing arguments on business oriented towards poverty reduction with the case of people with disabilities in Vietnam

With an eye ultimately to answering the question of how business can alleviate poverty completely, the paper examines existing arguments about the approach of business to poverty reduction with the case of people with disabilities living in poverty in Vietnam. The paper suggests that business should take the knowledge and potential of poor people into consideration in its interfaces with different types of poor people: consumers, workers, property owners, etc. Furthermore, investigating how business can help reduce poverty while still earning a profit and ensuring customer satisfaction limits research on business approach to poverty, since it assumes that business will have some “not-for-profit” purposes. The findings point out that businesses with “not-for-profit” purposes serve as a promising area for further exploration and research of business approach to poverty alleviation.

Global market shocks and poverty in Vietnam: the case of rice

AbstractWorld food prices have experienced dramatic increases in recent years. These “shocks” affect food importers and exporters alike. Vietnam is a major exporter of rice, and rice is also a key item in domestic production, employment, and consumption. Accordingly, rice price shocks from the world market have general equilibrium impacts and as such, their implications for household welfare are not known ex ante. In this article, we present a framework for understanding the direct and indirect welfare effects of a global market shock of this kind. We quantify transmission of the shock from global indicator prices to domestic markets. Then we use an applied general equilibrium model to simulate the economic effects of the price changes. A recursive mapping to a nationally representative household living standards survey permits us to identify in detail the ceteris paribus effects of the shock on household incomes and welfare. In this analysis, interregional and intersectoral labor market adjustments emerge as key channels transmitting the effects of global price shocks across sectors and among households.

False positives or hidden dimensions: What can monetary and multidimensional measurement tell us about child poverty in Vietnam?

Roelen K, Gassmann F, de Neubourg C. False positives or hidden dimensions: what can monetary and multidimensional measurement tell us about child poverty in Vietnam?A widely used division between poverty measures based on conceptual underpinnings and analytical outcomes is that of monetary versus multidimensional measures. Comparisons of the use and outcomes of the two methods have shown that they predominantly provide different pictures of poverty in terms of size, rank and group. This article contributes to the long‐standing and ongoing debate on poverty measurement by comparing the use of monetary and multidimensional poverty approaches, with a special focus on children in Vietnam and extending the empirical analysis beyond conventional methods. In addition to investigating whether poverty outcomes or groups of identified poor children differ when using the two different poverty measures, we also investigated the drivers underlying these differences. Findings confirm a considerable degree of mismatch: both poverty measures proved to be inadequate proxies for the other and factors underlying the identification by either one or both of the measures differed.

Exporting out of poverty: Provincial poverty in Vietnam and U.S. market access

Can a developing country reduce poverty by gaining increased market access to a large, rich country? The 2001 U.S.–Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) provides an excellent opportunity to examine this question as, unlike other bilateral trade agreements, the U.S. tariff cuts were not influenced by Vietnamese industries. Using variation in the structure of the labor force across provinces prior to the trade agreement, I construct provincial measures of U.S. tariffs. To address concerns over confounding trends between changes in provincial poverty and changes in provincial tariffs I follow two approaches: controlling for trends based on observable initial conditions and differencing away time invariant trends using pre-BTA data. I find that provinces that were more exposed to the U.S. tariff cuts experienced faster decreases in poverty between 2002 and 2004. Additionally, I document that the movement of workers across provinces is limited in scale, particularly for those with low levels of education. Finally, I show that the most exposed provinces experienced faster wage growth for workers with low levels of education, but not for highly educated workers.

The Impact of the Global Commodity and Financial Crises on Poverty in Vietnam

Economic growth in Vietnam was resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. Impacts on employment and poverty are also disputed. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose growth and distributional outcomes. Results indicate that the 2008 commodity crisis raised employment and reduced poverty by favoring labor-intensive exports. The 2009 financial crisis reversed these gains and pushed a million workers into unemployment and 3 million people below the poverty line. Overall, the crises and government stimulus package left growth and poverty in Vietnam virtually changed from a baseline (no crises) path.