Cuong Viet Nguyen

The impact of natural disasters on household income, expenditure, poverty and inequality: evidence from Vietnam

Natural disasters are expected exacerbate poverty and inequality, but little evidence exists to support the impact at household level. This article examines the effect of natural disasters on household income, expenditure, poverty and inequality using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey in 2008. The effects of a natural disaster on household income and expenditure, corrected for fixed effects and potential endogeneity bias, are estimated at 6.9% and 7.1% declines in Vietnamese household per capita income and expenditure, respectively. Natural disasters demonstrably worsen expenditure poverty and inequality in Vietnam, and thus should be considered as a factor in designing poverty alleviation policies.

The Impact of Recentralization on Public Services: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Abolition of Elected Councils in Vietnam

Comparative political economy offers a wealth of hypotheses connecting decentralization to improved public service delivery. In recent years, influential formal and experimental work has begun to question the underlying theory and empirical analyses of previous findings. At the same time, many countries have grown dissatisfied with the results of their decentralization efforts and have begun to reverse them. Vietnam is particularly intriguing because of the unique way in which it designed its recentralization, piloting a removal of elected peoples councils in 99 districts across the country and stratifying the selection by region, type of province, and urban versus rural setting. We take advantage of the opportunity provided by this quasi experiment to test the core hypotheses regarding the decision to shift administrative and fiscal authority to local governments. We find that recentralization significantly improved public service delivery in areas important to central policy-makers, especially in transportation, healthcare, and communications.

Does parental migration really benefit left-behind children? Comparative evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam

Millions of children are left behind when their parents migrate from home to another place. This study examines whether parental migration can affect health and cognitive ability of left-behind children aged at 5-8 years old in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. It uses data on 7725 children in the four countries collected from Young Lives surveys in 2007 and 2009. It finds that although parental migration helps families increase per capita consumption, it does not improve health and cognitive ability of children. The effect of parental migration varies across different countries and different types of migration. In Ethiopia, parental migration does not have a significant effect on children. However, parental migration reduces health outcomes of children in other three countries and decreases cognitive ability test scores in India and Vietnam. The negative effect on children tends to be higher for long-term parental migration than short-term parental migration.

Urban poverty in Vietnam: determinants and policy implications

This study examines the profile and determinants of poverty in the two largest cities in Vietnam – Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh. Data used in this study are from the 2009 Urban Poverty Survey. Using the poverty line of 12,000 thousand VND/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 structurally 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 they have much lower access to tap water than the non-poor. Heads of the poor households tend to have lower education and unskilled works than the heads of the non-poor households.

Poverty Identification: Practice and Policy Implications in Vietnam

To identify poor households, the government of Vietnam applies a combination of proxy means tests and quick collection of income data. This paper examines how well the governments poverty identification reaches the really poor in Vietnam. It is found that there is a large difference between the poverty rate for provinces and districts reported by the government and the rates estimated using expenditure and income data from independent household surveys. There is also a large difference between the poverty status of households identified by local authorities and the poverty status identified by income or expenditure data. More than 50 per cent of the poor households identified by local authorities are not poor in terms of income or expenditure measures. A better identification approach would be to use only proxy means tests and not income data collected using the simple questionnaire.

The impact of minimum wages on employment of low-wage workers

This study provides empirical evidence on the impact of a minimum wage increase on employment of workers in the formal sector who have wages below the minimum level in Vietnam. Using the difference‐in‐differences with propensity score matching and the Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys of 2004 and 2006, the article finds that the minimum wage increase in 2005 reduced the proportion of workers having a formal sector job among low‐wage workers. Most workers who lost formal sector jobs became self‐employed.

The impact of rural roads and irrigation on household welfare: evidence from Vietnam

Abstract We measure the impact of road and irrigation projects on the livelihoods of households in the poorest and most remote areas of Vietnam using difference-in-difference estimators. We find that both rural road and irrigation projects help local households improve the access to safe water and welfare measured by a wealth index. The impact of irrigation projects is found to be larger than the impact of road projects. We also find heterogeneous impacts of road and irrigation projects. Households with higher levels of education tend to benefit more from road projects, while households with lower levels of education are likely to benefit more from irrigation projects.

Poverty Targeting and Impact of a Governmental Micro-Credit Program in Vietnam

It is argued that without collateral the poor often face binding borrowing constraints in the formal credit market. This justifies a micro-credit program, which is operated by the Vietnam Bank for Social Policies to provide the poor with preferential credit. This paper examines poverty targeting and impact of the micro-credit program. It is found that the program is not very pro-poor in terms of targeting. Among the participants, the non-poor account for a larger proportion of loans. The non-poor also tend to receive larger amounts of credit compared to the poor. However, the program has positive impact on poverty reduction of the participants. This positive impact is found for all the three Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures.

The impact of natural disasters on children's education: Comparative evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam

The study finds a differential impact of different types of natural disasters on education and cognitive ability of children aged 12 to 15 years in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam using a Young Lives data set and child fixed‐effects regression. Floods tend to cause more harmful effects on childrens education than droughts, frosts, and hailstorms. Exposure to floods reduces the number of completed grades of children in Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam. For the case of Vietnam, exposure to floods also decreases school enrollment, and cognitive ability scores of children. Although floods do not have a significant effect on children in India, droughts, frosts, and hailstorms have a significantly negative effect on cognitive ability test scores of children. In Peru, the effect of disasters on childrens education is small and not statistically significant.

Proxy Means Tests to Identify the Income Poor: Application for the Case of Vietnam:

Poverty targeting plays an important role in ensuring the success of support programs for the poor. We assess the governmental poverty targeting in Vietnam, which identifies poor households by collecting income data using a simple two-page questionnaire. We propose a proxy means tests (PMT) method to predict income and poverty status of households using data on basic household characteristics. Compared with the poverty targeting using the simple income questionnaire, the PMT method has higher coverage and lower leakage rates. In addition, the proposed approach also allows for more transparent and comparable poverty estimation across small areas in Vietnam.Poverty targeting plays an important role in ensuring the success of support programs for the poor. We assess the governmental poverty targeting in Vietnam, which identifies poor households by collecting income data using a simple two-page questionnaire. We propose a proxy means tests (PMT) method to predict income and poverty status of households using data on basic household characteristics. Compared with the poverty targeting using the simple income questionnaire, the PMT method has higher coverage and lower leakage rates. In addition, the proposed approach also allows for more transparent and comparable poverty estimation across small areas in Vietnam.