Transition In Vietnam Research Articles

Forest transition in Vietnam: A case study of Northern mountain region

Since the 1990s Vietnam has experienced forest transition, of which there are mainly two arguments to understand, one is ‘smallholder agricultural intensification pathway’, and the other one is ‘policy initiated pathway’. The former puts more emphasis on local initiatives and the latter emphasizes the role of the government in forest transition. The purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship between the two pathways. Based on a particular case study from Vietnam, we analyze historical forest transition data generated from remote sensing imageries and field research during the period from the 1950s until 2008. As a result, we found that after 1989 the forest area in the study area recovered and smallholder played an important role in forest transition. However, they did not engage in reforestation activities on their own. Rather, government support, technical expertise, a tree processing facility, traders and a research institute all supported reforestation. This broader institutional support from government and the private sector was important next to farmer driven reforestation to explain forest transition.

Awareness of nutrition problems among Vietnamese health and education professionals.

Professionals who provide nutrition education and consulting to the public are encouraged to take into account the health, environmental and social contexts that influence health-related attitudes and behaviours in the population. This paper examined the awareness of shifts in population health outcomes associated with the nutrition transition in Vietnam among university nutrition lecturers, health professionals and school education professionals. Most of these professionals held accurate views of the current population health issues in Vietnam. However, they differed in their awareness of the seriousness of overweight and obesity. Although the majority indicated that the prevalence of obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) had increased, nearly half believed that the government should complete its attempts to control undernutrition before trying to control obesity. More health professionals believed that food marketing was responsible for the growing prevalence of children's obesity, and more of them disapproved of the marketing of less healthy food to children. In contrast, the university nutrition lecturers were least aware of food marketing and the seriousness of obesity. Of the three groups, the university nutrition lecturers held less accurate perceptions of nutrition transition problems and their likely drivers. There is an urgent need for greater provision of public nutrition education for all three groups of professionals.

Yielding to high yields? Critiquing food security definitions and policy implications for ethnic minority livelihoods in upland Vietnam

Agricultural intensification is at the core of the current agrarian transition in Southeast Asia. New crop varieties promise higher productive outputs, but depend on significant increases in chemical inputs. In the highlands of northern Vietnam, we find that adopting hybrid maize is inevitably associated with an increasing dependence on cash for direct and indirect inputs and investments. This reliance on the cash economy is a new reality for semi-subsistence ethnic minority Hmong households, and provides evidence of the advancing agrarian transition in Vietnam’s remote northern highlands. While livelihood outcomes of hybrid seed adoption include increased maize yields, local farmers highlight numerous drawbacks, including unstable input prices, limited storage periods, pest concerns, and the increased reliance on cash. Strong preferences for the taste of traditional local maize, as well as concerns over regular harvests, lead many households to resist the full adoption of new hybrid varieties and redirect hybrid maize to livestock feed and household alcohol production instead. Thus while state policies extoll the virtues of high-yielding hybrid maize for poverty reduction, we find that food availability is an overemphasized element of household food security and upland agricultural development policies. Food security interventions must move beyond conceptualizing food security as a result of food availability alone, and also incorporate cultural acceptability of food, better understandings of hybrid maize cultivation challenges, and respect the seed diversity on which local livelihoods and food security rely.

Living Arrangements and Psychological Well-Being of the Older Adults After the Economic Transition in Vietnam.

We examine the relationship between living arrangements and psychological well-being of the older adults in Vietnam, where there is an influence of Confucian values and a lack of close substitutes for family care of the older adults, by exploiting a great deal of regional variation in economic development. We also examine the role of living arrangements in well-being differentials across regions. We estimate a triangular simultaneous-equation discrete-response model, which accounts for the simultaneity between living arrangements and psychological well-being (happiness, depression, loneliness, poor appetite, and sleep disorder), using a nationally representative sample of 2,225 adults aged 60 and older drawn from the 2011 Vietnam Aging Survey. Intergenerational coresidence significantly increases the psychological well-being of the older adults in Vietnam. The results are fairly robust, even after taking quasi-coresidence into account, decomposing the psychological well-being index into each affect and symptom, and splitting the sample by gender. Changes in living arrangements induced by differences in labor market opportunities in neighboring regions have resulted in significant differences in psychological well-being among the older adults. The findings point to the need for attention to the mental health of elderly parents left behind in less economically developed regions.

The Political Economy of Mental Health in Vietnam: Key Lessons for Countries in Transition

AbstractAmong low‐ and middle‐income countries, there is evidence that populations experiencing rapid political and economic transition have particularly high burdens of disease and disability from mental health conditions. This paper undertakes a political economy analysis of mental health in Vietnam to enhance knowledge translation, notably how both explicit and tacit knowledge can be used to promote evidence‐based policy making. It argues that Vietnam's experience illustrates the need to better understand, not only how transition transforms societies, but how it impacts on the mental health needs and care of populations. The political economy of transition in Vietnam has so far given highest priority to economic growth through integration with the world economy and public sector reform. There is a need to recognise that transition in Vietnam poses both a potential threat to the care of people with mental health needs, and an opportunity to develop mental health services appropriate to local contexts.

Medical stratification in Vietnam

Market transition in Vietnam is known to have fueled health disparities, but racialized and nationality-linked aspects of the country’s medical stratification have received less attention, despite the growing presence of foreigners using the health system. Field experiences reveal the country’s increasing health and medical inequity – legible in the social, linguistic, economic, and physical distinctions between public health stations staffed by government employees and the private clinics serving mostly expatriates. Ethnographic interviews and experiences of receiving care in both public and private facilities inform my argument that the privatization of Vietnam’s health sector produces racialized, classed, and citizenship-linked forms of medical profit, privilege, segregation, and risk – trends visible both in recent debates over US health policy and recent episodes of pandemic disease outbreak.

Classifying and mapping the urban transition in Vietnam

The urban transition almost always involves wrenching social adjustment as small agricultural communities are forced to adjust rapidly to industrial ways of life. Large-scale in-migration of young people, usually from poor regions, creates enormous demand and expectations for community and social services. One immediate problem planners face in approaching this challenge is how to define, differentiate, and map what is rural, urban, and transitional (i.e., peri-urban). This project established an urban classification for Vietnam by using national census and remote sensing data to identify and map the smallest administrative units for which data are collected as rural, peri-urban, urban, or urban core. We used both natural and human factors in the quantitative model: income from agriculture, land under agriculture and forests, houses with modern sanitation, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. Model results suggest that in 2006, 71% of Vietnam's 10,891 communes were rural, 18% peri-urban, 3% urban, and 4% urban core. Of the communes our model classified as peri-urban, 61% were classified by the Vietnamese government as rural. More than 7% of Vietnam's land area can be classified as peri-urban and approximately 13% of its population (more than 11 million people) lives in peri-urban areas. We identified and mapped three types of peri-urban places: communes in the periphery of large towns and cities; communes along highways; and communes associated with provincial administration or home to industrial, energy, or natural resources projects (e.g., mining). We validated this classification based on ground observations, analyses of multi-temporal night-time lights data, and an examination of road networks. The model provides a method for rapidly assessing the rural–urban nature of places to assist planners in identifying rural areas undergoing rapid change with accompanying needs for investments in building, sanitation, road infrastructure, and government institutions.

Internal Migration and the Renovation-era Fertility Decline in Vietnam

The Renovation era in Vietnam (since 1986) has been a period of dramatic social change accompanied by large volume of internal migration. This study aims to identify a link between migration and the rapid decline of fertility levels among Vietnamese women in the last stage of the fertility transition in Vietnam. Data from the Vietnam Demographic and Health Survey 2002 was used to examine three theories of socialization, adaptation and migration on women’s fertility. These theories are examined by fitting both OLS and Poisson regression models for the number of children ever born. The results most strongly support the adaptation theory after controlling for education, age, age at marriage and wanted fertility. Women adapt to the fertility norms at their place of current residence to a greater extent than their place of birth. More specifically, among women born in rural areas, those who currently live in urban areas have 17 percent fewer children ever born than those who live in rural areas. This seems to be primarily due to adaptation to the new environment rather than to the act of migration itself, suggesting that migrating was not associated with lower or higher fertility during the Renovation era in Vietnam.

Environmental Cognitions, Land Change and Social-Ecological Feedbacks: Local Case Studies of Forest Transition in Vietnam

Forest transition — i.e., the shift from decreasing to expanding forest cover — in the northern mountains of Vietnam was analyzed at the local scale in four villages from the 1970s to 2007–2008 to understand feedbacks from local environmental degradation on land uses, the conditions under which such feedbacks occur, and their possible roles in the transition. Remote sensing data were combined with field surveys including interviews, group discussions, mental and participatory mapping, observations and secondary sources. The feedbacks from environmental degradation and changes in the provision of ecosystem services to land practices via environmental cognitions were analyzed. The case studies showed that forest scarcity was perceived, interpreted and evaluated before possibly affecting land use practices.

Foreign direct investment in industrial transition: the experience of Vietnam

This paper examines the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the process of industrial transition in Vietnam under market-oriented reforms. The findings are consistent with the conventional wisdom that concomitant liberalisation of trade and investment regimes, accompanied by creating a congenial environment for market-based decision making by the private agents, is vital for reaping developmental gains from FDI. During the 1990s growth of employment in firms with foreign capital participation lagged behind output growth, reflecting the capital-intensity bias in domestic-market-oriented production in a partially liberalised economy. This pattern has changed notably in recent years as the product mix gradually became export oriented in response to further liberalisation of trade and investment policy regimes.

Review Essay: Land, Labour and Agrarian Transition in Vietnam

Martin Ravallion and Dominique van de Walle argue that growing landlessness in Vietnam is a function of people capitalizing on the higher returns to education witnessed in wage labour when compared with farming. So, growing landlessness is a sign of economic success. This review argues that Ravallion and van de Walle misconstrue landlessness, misinterpret the associated data and downplay the constraints facing rural Vietnamese. In so doing, they fail to capture the complex realities of Vietnam's agrarian transition.

Land use transitions: Socio-ecological feedback versus socio-economic change

The concept of land use transition highlights that land use change is non-linear and is associated with other societal and biophysical system changes. A transition in land use is not a fixed pattern, nor is it deterministic. Land use transitions can be caused by negative socio-ecological feedbacks that arise from a depletion of key resources or from socio-economic change and innovation that take place rather independently from the ecological system. Here, we explore whether the sources of land use transitions are mostly endogenous socio-ecological forces or exogenous socio-economic factors. We first review a few generic pathways of forest transition as identified in national case studies, and evaluate the varying ecological quality of expanding forests associated with these pathways. We then discuss possible explanatory frameworks of land use transitions. We use the case of the recent forest transition in Vietnam as an illustration. Socio-ecological feedbacks seem to better explain a slowing down of deforestation and stabilization of forest cover, while exogenous socio-economic factors better account for reforestation. We conclude by discussing the prospects of accelerating land use transitions in tropical forest countries.

Forest transition in Vietnam and displacement of deforestation abroad.

In some countries across the globe, tropical forest cover is increasing. The national-scale reforestation of Vietnam since 1992 is assumed to contribute to this recovery. It is achieved, however, by the displacement of forest extraction to other countries on the order of 49 (34-70) M m(3), or approximately 39% of the regrowth of Vietnam's forests from 1987 to 2006. Approximately half of wood imports to Vietnam during this period were illegal. Leakage due to policies restricting forest exploitation and displacement due to growing domestic consumption and exports contributed respectively to an estimated 58% and 42% of total displacement. Exports of wood products from Vietnam also grew rapidly, amounting to 84% of the displacement, which is a remarkable feature of the forest transition in Vietnam. Attribution of the displacement and corresponding forest extraction to Vietnam, the source countries or the final consumers is thus debatable. Sixty-one percent of the regrowth in Vietnam was, thus, not associated with displacement abroad. Policies allocating credits to countries for reducing deforestation and forest degradation should monitor illegal timber trade and take into account the policy-induced leakage of wood extraction to other countries.

Land Titling and Rural Transition in Vietnam

We examine the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam, which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land‐use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform, to identify the impact of the law. We find that the additional land rights led to statistically significant increases in the share of total area devoted to long‐term crops and in labor devoted to nonfarm activities. However, these changes are not large in magnitude and appear to be driven mainly by the increased security of tenure provided by the law rather than by increased access to credit markets or greater land market participation.

Forest transition in Vietnam and its environmental impacts

AbstractThis study assesses the presence of a forest transition – that is, a shift from net deforestation to net reforestation – in Vietnam during the 1990s, and describes its key attributes relevant for global environmental change issues. Using Fuzzy Kappa and other indicators, we compared forest cover estimates and spatial patterns from global and national land cover maps from the early and late 1990s, and compiled other available statistics for years before and after that period. This showed that a forest transition indeed occurred in Vietnam: the forest cover dropped to 25–31% of the country area in 1991–1993, and then increased to 32–37% in 1999–2001. The reforestation occurred at a higher rate than deforestation in the previous decades, and was due in similar proportions, to natural forest regeneration and to planted forests. The carbon stock in forests followed a similar transition, decreasing to 903 (770–1307) Tg C in 1991–1993, and then increasing to 1374 (1058–1744) Tg C in 2005. However, forest density declined during the same period, with an increasing proportion of young and degraded forests. The effects on habitats measured with landscape pattern indices were contrasted: in several regions, the reforestation decreased forest fragmentation, while in others, clearing of old‐growth forests continued and/or forest fragmentation increased. This shows that a transition in forest area is not sufficient to rehabilitate the different ecosystem functions and services of forests. Other forest transitions exist in Tropical Asia and in Latin America. Knowledge about the causes, pattern and environmental impacts of the forest transition in Vietnam is therefore relevant to understand possible emerging regional trends that would have implications for global environmental change.

Symposium on Transition in Vietnam

Symposium on Transition in Vietnam

Resourcing Conservative Transition in Vietnam: Rent Switching and Resource Appropriation

This article applies a novel approach to analysis of the transition to the market economy in Vietnam, a country with a political economy that draws upon South-East Asian, Sinic and Leninist cultural elements. This was a 'conservative' transition, in the sense that no shift in political regime occurred. Understanding transition as a process where endogenous forces drive and resource institutional change, and far from dependent upon policy shifts, the article argues that it relied heavily upon two sets of phenomena. The first may be understood in terms of the creation and seeking out of economic rents, in the 'neoclassical' sense of resources available 'below economic costs'. When rents result from institutional obstacles to competition, institutional change can support relatively costless output gains. I argue for Vietnam that as the economic system switched from plan to market, so rent seeking shifted away from advantageous access to resources for plan implementation, to switching resources into forms that supported market-oriented activity. This 'rent switching' (RS) relied upon adaptive social relations, comparable to the 'competitive clientelism' of the SEA studies literature, that were preserved and augmented during transition. It also permitted mobilisation of resources derived from static efficiency gains. This framework contrasts with a second, more 'classical' in nature, that concentrates upon the creation of appropriable resources (ARs) and contestation over them. These help explain the medium and longer term, and how ways of appropriating resources supported the political economy of systemic change. At root, this is then to do with the emergence of factor markets (land, labour and capital), class formation and thus broader social and cultural change. The article thus argues that different economic theories provide useful insights into the social as well as the economic implications and nature of the transition to a market economy. Given that static efficiency gains, whilst significant in relative impact, tend to act over the short term, and, since growth processes take decades, the 'neoclassical' approach is ultimately less important than the 'classical' one.

Institutional Adaptation to Environmental Risk under the Transition in Vietnam

This paper develops a theoretical perspective on institutional adaptation to social vulnerability to environmental risks. Institutions encompass both socialized ways of interacting and underlying worldviews, as well as structures and organizations that influence resource allocation. The adaptation of institutions that mediate vulnerability to environmental change can be observed by examining actual resource allocations and the processes of decisionmaking and nondecisionmaking, as well as by examining changing perceptions of vulnerability. Institutional adaptation is evaluated in Nam Dinh Province in northern Vietnam, a country presently undergoing rapid economic and political transition. The case study highlights local-level institutional adaptation to environmental risks associated with flooding and typhoon impacts in the coastal environment. It is carried out through fieldwork involving qualitative household surveys and interviewing to elicit present and recent coping and adaptation strategies in the context of rapid changes in property rights and economic circumstances. Although Vietnam’s transition from state central planning is often heralded as a macroeconomic success story, this study argues that the transition has had negative impacts on social vulnerability. A decrease in collective action for risk management by state institutions is exacerbated by inertia in some aspects of the decentralized state planning system, while the parallel spontaneous reemergence of civil institutions forms a counterbalancing institutional adaptation.

Social Vulnerability to Climate Change and Extremes in Coastal Vietnam

A framework for analyzing social vulnerability is outlined, an aspect largely underemphasized in assessments of the impacts of climate change and climate extremes. Vulnerability is defined in this paper as the exposure of individuals or collective groups to livelihood stress as a result of the impacts of such environmental change. It is constituted by individual and collective aspects which can be disaggregated, but are linked through the political economy of markets and institutions. Research in coastal northern Vietnam shows that baseline social vulnerability is enhanced by some institutional and economic factors associated with Vietnam's economic transition from central planning, namely the breakdown of collective action on protection from extreme events and an increasingly skewed income. Offsetting these trends are other institutional changes associated with the dynamic nature of the economic restructuring and evolution of the market transition in Vietnam, which decrease vulnerability.

Leadership Transition in Vietnam since the Eighth Party Congress: The Unfinished Congress

Leadership Transition in Vietnam since the Eighth Party Congress: The Unfinished Congress