Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey Research Articles

Access to Preferential Loans for Poverty Reduction and Rural Development: Evidence from Vietnam

:Preferential loans play an important role in the process of reducing poverty in developing countries. Considering the data set from the 2010 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, we aim to examine the influential factors in probability of households getting access to preferential loans. Additionally, we analyze the determinants of household income in association with the loans by applying a quantile regression model. Our results show that ethnicity-related factors have the largest marginal effect on the access to preferential loans. The results from the quantile regression model demonstrate that the debt factor has a deeper impact on the borrowing group at the lower quantiles of household income.

Program participation in a targeted land distribution program and household outcomes: evidence from Vietnam

We estimate whether a land reform program led to higher incomes for ethnic minority households. In 2002, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, Program 132 directed the transfer of farm land to ethnic minority households that had less than one hectare of land. Using the 2002 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey as a baseline, in 2008 we resurveyed over one-thousand households to provide a retrospective evaluation of the impact of their participation in Program 132. Contrary to official reports, our findings show that there was considerable deviation from the planned program parameters: many eligible households did not receive land, while ineligible households often did. We estimate that beneficiaries of the program in the province of Kon Tum experienced increases of household income largely in line with what one would expect from a small plot of poor farm land. Outside Kon Tum, where participation rates were substantially lower, the story is more mixed, and household incomes did not improve with program participation. Overall, our results underscore the limitations of simple transfers of land as a mechanism for improving the living standards of ethnic minorities. Our results also show the significant gap that can exist between program design and decentralized implementation. We discuss the potential implications for program evaluation.

How would cash transfers improve child welfare in Viet Nam?

This paper was aimed to estimate how cash transfer to children could help increase access to education and health services as well as to reduce their poverty. To pursue these objectives, we first applied fixed-effect regression models with a panel data from Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) in 2010 and 2012, and then used the predicted results to simulate how welfare indicators would have been changed if children were provided benefits at different levels. We found that cash transfers would have a positive effect on school enrolment and poverty. However, cash transfers would have no significant effects on both impatient admissions and outpatient visits as well as out-of-pocket spending on health care, but a significant effect on the probability of having health insurance. From these findings, we proposed some policy recommendations such as promoting cash transfer program for more vulnerable groups of children would provide opportunities for them to further reduce poverty and increase access to education and health. More importantly, the research emphasized that quality of services to be provided along with cash transfers should also be guaranteed, so as to make sure that the current benefits will be fully translated into socio-economic development of Viet Nam.

Small area estimation by multilevel models applied to the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys

This paper discusses a methodology to obtain small area estimates in the context of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys (VHLSS). Focusing on the use of random effects in small area regression models, a multilevel model is proposed for small area estimation at the commune level in Vietnam which incorporates random effects at the commune, district and province levels. The model estimates the commune-level mean (logarithm of) household expenditure per capita from a set of independent variables which are available both in the 1999 Census and in the VHLSS of 2002. Following ideas given in work by Moura [4,5], the small area estimation for VHLSS communes is performed by plugging the population means of the independent variables into the regression equation, inclusive of suitable random effects both in the intercept and in the coefficient of the dummy variable for the urban location of a household. The small area estimation for non-VHLSS communes is calculated in the same way, with random effects estimated by averaging random effects of nearest VHLSS communes. We also mention how to measure the accuracy of our small area estimators, and find that including random effects in the model clearly improves the accuracy of the small area estimation. A useful by-product of the analysis is the generation of Location Impact Factors (LIF), which yield a measure of the effect of geographical location when covariates such as education of head of household or household size have been accounted for. To the best of our knowledge, the idea of using LIF measures along with small area estimates for poverty targeting is novel.

Measurement of Poverty in Multiple Dimensions: The Case of Vietnam

The notion of multidimensional poverty is widely conceded and is increasingly engaging the interest of researchers and scholars, however, it is rarely used in explorations of the situation of Vietnam. Using national data from 9399 households in the 2012 Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, we apply the integrated fuzzy relative approach for poverty, a completely novel methodology in this context, to explore the current patterns of multidimensional deprivation in Vietnam at different levels, including the incidence and intensity of the poverty of migrants’ households. Our findings reveal that these households are most deprived in the basic services dimension, while in the health dimension they are least deprived. A stark disparity exists between ethnic, and educational groups, and that female-headed households are less deprived, except in the durable asset dimension. The results further reveal that the situation of migrants’ households is better than that of their non-migrant counterparts in almost all non-monetary dimensions, but not in the monetary dimension. However, migration of family members leads to improvement in the income of the left behind families in the least developed areas in Vietnam. Our observation exposes differences in the complex nature of poverty in regional Vietnam from that of the current headcount measure of absolute income poverty.

Growth with equity: income inequality in Vietnam, 2002–14

We use the 2002 through 2014 Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys to construct comparable measures of household income and estimates of income inequality over this high-growth period. We focus on two questions: How have benefits from growth been distributed; and do changes in the structure of the economy map into changes in inequality? We explore dimensions in which inequality may vary, notably urban versus rural, and by ethnic status. We also decompose inequality by income source to highlight key factors underlying the relatively low levels of inequality during this period. We find that agricultural opportunities played an important role in dampening inequality, but more important has been the steady development of wage-labor markets in both urban and rural areas. An important caveat to the generally rosy picture we paint is the deteriorating position of ethnic minorities. Finally, we draw comparisons with China and document key differences in their growth-inequality experiences.

The Impact of Domestic Remittances on Left-Behind Older People in Vietnam

In the context of an insufficient social protection system the economic lives of older people, especially those living in rural areas, are greatly changed with socio-economic risks that are associated with the strong rural-urban mobility of younger generations. This paper aims to investigate the impacts on the economic well-being of old-age parents of domestic remittances, sent by their children who have migrated from rural to urban areas. Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) in 2004, 2008 and 2012 with logistic regression models, we found that domestic remittances played an essential role in improving income/ expenditure per capita and reducing poverty rates of older people’s households. Domestic remittances also contributed to reduce Gini coefficients, which were calculated using both income and expenditure per capita.

Does having more children increase the likelihood of parental smoking? Evidence from Vietnam

Evidence has shown that parental smoking can cause health problems for children. It might be expected that parents who are aware of the harmful effects of second-hand smoke will reduce their smoking, especially as they have more children. However, based on instrumental variable regressions using data from the 2006 and 2008 Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys, we find a strongly positive and significant effect of the number of children on the probability of tobacco smoking in households in Vietnam. An additional child increases the probability of tobacco consumption in the household by approximately 15%. These findings imply low levels of awareness of the harmful effects of second-hand smoke on children’s health in Vietnam, and indicate the need for policy action to disseminate knowledge on the harmful effects of smoking.

Drivers of transaction costs affecting participation in the rental market for cropland in Vietnam

Farm incomes in rural Vietnam are tightly constrained by very small farm sizes. Stringent limits on the area of cropland that individuals may own means that farmers need a well‐functioning rental market to consolidate land parcels, grow their farm enterprises, adopt new technology and increase incomes. This research investigates the efficiency and equity impacts of the rental market in rural Vietnam and attempts to identify transaction costs impeding the market. A generalised ordered logit model with shifting thresholds allowing transaction costs to impact lessors and lessees differently was specified and estimated using data extracted from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys. The findings show that rental transactions reduced imbalances in factor endowments, transferring cropland to households that were relatively land‐poor but more willing and able to farm. However, the market is constrained by transaction costs that affect lessors and lessees differently. It is recommended that government should complete its land registration program and relax restrictions on the use of wetlands to grow crops other than rice. It should also improve access to all‐weather roads as this encourages participation on both sides of the rental market, whereas better access to communications infrastructure was found to promote only the supply side.

Rural--Urban Migration and Remittances in Vietnam: Evidence from Migrant Tracer Data

We examine remittance behavior of rural-urban migrants in Vietnam using a unique data set that links the 2012 round of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) with a 2013 tracer study of migrants from VHLSS households. We estimate factors associated with remittances, taking migrant selection issues into account. We also estimate impacts of net remittances on per capita income in migrant-sending rural households, taking into account the endogeneity of remittances. We find that migration and remittances increase the incomes of rural households. However, the estimated direct income effects are small, and become smaller still as migrants become more established in their new place of residence. Members of ethnic minority groups gain far less than others from migration and remittances. More data and research are needed to broaden these assessments to include non-economic benefits and costs of migration.

FACTORS AFFECTING ECONOMIC WELL-BEING AMONG POOR AND NON-POOR HOUSEHOLDS

This paper focuses on examining the key factors affecting the living standards of Vietnam at the household-level in 2010. In this study, the multiple linear regression model was used to determine the impacts of variables related to the household characteristics, main jobs of heads, and the access of public services on the monthly per capita expenditure of the poor and non-poor based on the data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey 2010. The empirical findings indicate that in 2010 the expenditure per capita of the poor and non-poor households was affected by many factors, including education and qualification level, region, ethnicity, size of household, working member proportion and water source. However, the empirical study shows that although employment sector was one of the determinants of per capita expenditure of the non-poor households, it had an insignificant impact on per capita expenditure of the poor households.

Growth with Equity: Income Inequality in Vietnam, 2002–14

We use the 2002 through 2014 Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys to construct comparable measures of household income and estimates of income inequality over this high-growth period. We focus on two questions: How have benefits from growth been distributed; and do changes in the structure of the economy map into changes in inequality? We explore dimensions in which inequality may vary, notably urban versus rural, and by ethnic status. We also decompose inequality by income source to highlight key factors underlying the relatively low levels of inequality during this period. We find that agricultural opportunities played an important role in dampening inequality, but more important has been the steady development of wage-labor markets in both urban and rural areas. An important caveat to the generally rosy picture we paint is the deteriorating position of ethnic minorities. Finally, we draw comparisons with China and document key differences in their growth-inequality experience.

Migration in Vietnam: New Evidence from Recent Surveys

The authors investigate determinants of individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with increasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility. Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) of 2012, the authors find that probability of migration is strongly associated with individual, household and community-level characteristics. The probability of migration is higher for young people and those with post-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to be from households with better-educated household heads, female-headed households, and households with higher youth dependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups are much less likely to migrate, other things equal. Using multinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broad destination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers of migration to those moving to other destinations. The authors also use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allows us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants, those present in the household in 2010, but who have moved away by 2012. This yields much tighter results. For education below upper secondary school, the evidence on positive selection by education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority ‘penalty’ on spatial labor mobility remains strong and significant, even after controlling for specific characteristics of households and communes. This lack of mobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctive persistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minority populations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished.

The Decision to Invest in Child Quality over Quantity: Household Size and Household Investment in Education in Vietnam

During Vietnam's two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly—macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. We investigate whether the micro-level evidence supports the hypothesis that Vietnamese parents are in fact making a tradeoff between quantity and “quality” of children. We present private tutoring—a widespread education phenomenon in Vietnam—as a new measure of household investment in children's quality, combining it with traditional measures of household education investments. To assess the quantity-quality tradeoff, we instrument for family size using the commune distance to the nearest family planning center. Our IV estimation results based on data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys (VHLSSs) and other sources show that rural families do indeed invest less in the education of school-age children who have larger numbers of siblings. This effect holds for several different indicators of educational investment and is robust to different definitions of family size, identification strategies, and model specifications that control for community characteristics as well as the distance to the city center. Finally, our estimation results suggest that private tutoring may be a better measure of quality-oriented household investments in education than traditional measures like enrollment, which are arguably less nuanced and less household-driven.

Intergenerational Mobility of Earnings and Income Among Sons and Daughters in Vietnam

This paper empirically examines intergenerational economic mobility in Vietnam. The two-sample two-stage least squares estimation is employed to achieve the research objective using two primary samples of father-son pairs and father-daughter pairs from Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey of 2012, and one secondary sample from Vietnam Living Standards Survey of 1997-1998. The baseline intergenerational elasticity estimates show that Vietnam occupies the intermediate degrees of intergenerational mobility of earnings and income for both sons and daughters. In particular, a rise of 10% in fathers’ individual earnings is on average associated with an increase of 3.61% and 3.94% for sons’ individual earnings and individual income, respectively. The corresponding figures for daughters’ individual earnings and individual income are 2.84% and 3.33%, respectively. This paper also provides evidence on the average degree of inequality of opportunity in Vietnam during its transition from a central planning economy to a market-oriented system.

Intergenerational Mobility of Earnings and Income Among Sons and Daughters in Vietnam

<p>In this thesis, I investigate intergenerational mobility of earnings and income among sons and daughters in Vietnam. In particular, my objective is to estimate intergenerational elasticity (IGE) of sons’ and daughters’ individual earnings, individual income, and family income with respective to father’s individual earnings. The two-sample two-stage least squares (TS2SLS) estimation is employed to achieve the research objective using two primary samples of father-son pairs and father-daughter pairs from Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys (VHLSS) of 2012 and one secondary sample from Vietnam Living Standard Surveys (VLSS) of 1997-98. My results show that the baseline IGE estimates of Vietnamese sons are 0.361, 0.394 and 0.567 for individual earnings, individual income, and family income, respectively. For Vietnamese daughters, the baseline IGE estimates are 0.284, 0.333 and 0.522 for individual earnings, individual income, and family income, respectively. These IGE estimates explicitly reveal that Vietnam has the intermediate degrees of individual earnings and individual income mobility, and the low degree of family income mobility cross generations for both sons and daughters by the international comparison.</p>

Job Opportunities in Foreign Firms and Internal Migration in Vietnam

Using the 2004 Vietnam Migration Survey and the 2004 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, this paper investigates the role of employment opportunities created by foreign-owned firms as a determinant of internal migration and destination choice. Multinomial logit and conditional logit models are estimated to study both origin-and destination-specific characteristics of migrants. The paper finds that the migration response to foreign job opportunities is larger for female workers than male workers; there appears to be intermediate selection in terms of educational attainment; and migrating individuals tend to go to destinations with higher foreign employment opportunities, even when controlling for income differentials, land differentials and distances between sending and receiving areas.

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.

The impact of health insurance for children under age 6 in Vietnam: A regression discontinuity approach

Accessing health services at an early age is important to future health and life outcomes. Yet, little is currently known on the role of health insurance in facilitating access to care for children. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design made possible through a policy to provide health insurance to pre-school aged children in Vietnam, this paper evaluates the impact of health insurance on the health care utilization outcomes of children at the eligibility threshold of six years. Using three rounds of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, the study finds a positive impact on inpatient and outpatient visits and no significant impact on expenditures per visit at public facilities. We find moderately high use of private outpatient services and no evidence of a switch from private to covered public facilities under insurance. Results suggest that adopting public health insurance programs for children under age 6 may be an important vehicle to improving service utilization in a low- and middle-income country context. Challenges remain in providing adequate protections from the costs and other barriers to care.

Trade openness and household welfare within a country: A microeconomic analysis of Vietnamese households

The positive effects of trade liberalisation on several dimensions of poverty have initiated studies of the trade–poverty relationship. Trade liberalisation accompanies institutional reforms that help to reduce institutional barriers against the poor. This study examines the impacts of trade openness and institutional reforms on rural household welfare at the provincial level through the analysis of the determinants of welfare of rural households in Vietnam. The study employs a model of micro-determinants of growth and tests it on the data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys (VHLSSs) of 2006 and 2010. What makes the study different from some other studies of the same vein is that it attempts to directly capture the institutional effect on welfare. The study finds that, in the provinces with high institutional reforms and trade openness, the welfare of rural households improved. Institutional reforms in Vietnam appeared to be sluggish in the late 2000s. In particular, both access to land and lower informal charges were the important determinants of welfare improvement over time. These findings suggest that Vietnam should maintain its development by accelerating the process of institutional reforms, thereby helping poor households to improve standards of living.