Nguyen Viet Cuong

Economic impacts of international migration and remittances on household welfare in Vietnam

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of international remittances on different household welfare indicators including child education, assets, durable goods, and reservation wages of other working age household members. It examines how international remittances are spent for production and consumption by receiving households. Design/methodology/approach - This paper uses fixed-effect regressions to estimate the impact of international remittances on household spending in Vietnam using Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys 2006 and 2008. Findings - It is found that most of international remittances are spent on housing and land, debt repayment and saving. A small proportion of remittances are used to buy durable goods. Remittances are not spent in production as well as living consumptions. The effect of international remittances on consumption-based poverty is very limited. Originality/value - The findings from this paper suggest that current international remittances are not an effective measure for poverty reduction in the short-run in Vietnam.

Does Parental Disability Matter to Child Education? Evidence from Vietnam

This paper examines the effect of parental disability on school enrollment and educational performance for children in the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey. Results from instrumental-variables regressions indicate that children of parents with a disability have a lower enrollment rate in primary and secondary school of about 8 percentage points: 73 percent compared with 81 percent. However, the association of parental disability with educational performance is small and not statistically significant. The conclusion of the paper is that to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary school as well as increased coverage of secondary education, the government should have policies and programs that either directly support the education of children with disabled parents and/or have policies that support disabled adults, thus lessening the incentive for their children not to attend school.

Impact of Public and Private Cash Transfers on Poverty and Inequality: Evidence from Vietnam

This article investigates the extent to which public and private transfers affected poverty and inequality in Vietnam in the mid�?2000s. It finds that the impact of public transfers on poverty was negligible, due to the low coverage of the poor and the relatively small amounts transferred. Moreover, the effect of the receipt of transfers on expenditures was small: recipients decreased the labour supply and only a limited amount of the extra income went to current consumption. Domestic private transfers were somewhat more successful in reducing poverty. With most public and private transfers going to non�?poor households, inequality was only marginally affected.

A Method to Update Poverty Maps

Abstract The small area estimation method proposed by Elbers et al. (Elbers, C., Lanjouw, J. and Lanjouw, P. (2003) Micro-level estimation of poverty and inequality. Econometrica, 71(1), pp. 355–364) combines a household survey and a census to generate a disaggregated map of poverty measures. Since censuses are often conducted every 10 years, construction of poverty maps on a regular basis is not straightforward. This article discusses methods to update poverty maps for years between censuses by combining an old census and new household surveys. These discussed methods are illustrated by producing a poverty map in Vietnam for the years 2004 and 2006 using the 1999 Population and Housing Census and Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys in 2002, 2004 and 2006. The validation of the updating methods is examined by comparing poverty estimates in 2006 obtained from the updating methods with benchmark poverty estimates obtained from the standard ‘small area estimation’ method using data from the 2006 Vietnam Household Living and the 2006 Rural Agriculture and Fishery Census.

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.

Should Parents Work Away from or Close to Home? The Effect of Parental Absence on Children's Time Use in Vietnam

Abstract Working away from home might bring higher earnings than working near home. However, the absence of parents due to work can have unexpected effects on children. This paper examines the effects of the absence of parents due to work on time allocation of children aged 5–8 years old in Vietnam. The paper relies on fixed-effects regression and panel data from the Young Lives surveys in 2007 and 2009. It finds that children with parental absence tend to spend less time on home study but more time on leisure and playing. The effect of mother absence on home study of children is higher than the effect of father absence. Moreover, children with mother absence are more likely to do housework than other children. This finding highlights the important role of mothers in taking care of children in terms of both education and housework.

The Importance of Intellectual Capital for Firm Performance: Evidence from Australia

This study investigates the dynamic relationship between intellectual capital (IC) and firm performance (FP) through system generalized methods of moments, when previous studies produced divergent results based on static OLS or fixed-effects estimations. Based on 571 listed firms in Australia for the period of 2005-2014 (5518 firm-years) this study reveals that IC efficiency is positively significant with ROA and ROE – which endorses resource based theory. Further analysis shows that human capital, structural capital and physical capital are also significant and confidently endorse resource-dependency and Organisation-Learning theories. The findings of this study are vital for stakeholders such as a firm’s management, shareholders, and potential investors to understand the role of IC for FP. Moreover, the findings are particularly important for policy-setters to highlight the importance of IC and develop a systematic framework for IC disclosure. This study also opens new avenues for future research to consider the dynamic nature of the IC-FP relationship and account for endogeneity.