This paper examines the poverty and inequality pattern, income and characteristics of households in the Program 135-II communes – the poorest areas in Vietnam. The poverty incidence decreased from 57.5 percent to 49.2 percent during the period 2007-2012. Although the poverty incidence...

Vietnam’s extensive social security system is claimed to have played a key role in the extraordinary poverty decline over the past decades. This claim is, however, not substantiated by empirical evidence. In this study, we investigate how well contributory pensions and social allowances...

This study measures the effect of minimum wage increases on firm outcomes using fixed-effects regression and panel data from Vietnam Enterprise Censuses during 2008-2010. It is found that minimum wages reduce firms’ labor size, albeit at a small magnitude. A one percent increase in real...

To increase the opportunities for poor ethnic minorities to benefit from economic growth the government of Vietnam implemented one of the biggest poverty reduction programs entitled ‘Socio-economic Development for the Communes Facing Greatest Hardships in the Ethnic Minority and Mountainous...

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...

This article posits that there is no a priori reason that industrial upgrading and market expansion leads to greater social protections or better regulation. I ask three questions and attempt a conceptual framework for institutions and their broader spatial evolution. A firm’s regional risk...

In order to deal with problems related to both water quality and quantity as well as to strengthen the sustainable and integrative management of the nation’s water resources, the Vietnamese Government has adopted a wide spectrum of laws and regulations. In recent years, more than 300 water...

The need for effective supervision of capital markets is becoming all the more evident in the aftermath of the recent LIBOR and rate rigging scandals. Financial regulators or indeed bank regulators cannot perform such a function effectively without the involvement of auditors in the supervisory...

Republic of Korean – Vietnam relation has been rapidly deepened in all fields, especially trade and investment since the establishment of diplomatic ties in 1992. This paper analyzes the patterns and trends in the trade relations between the two countries in the past twenty years. Various...

The study provides the Ministry of Finance (MOF) of the Government of Vietnam with quantitative tools to carry out industry-level assessments of tariff and subsidy reforms that will both support the country’s WTO accession negotiations and provide needed capacity for analyzing alternative...