Many developing countries lack spatially disaggregated price data. Some analysts use "no-price" methods by using a food Engel curve to derive the deflator as that needed for nominally similar households to have equal food shares in all regions and time periods. This method cannot be tested in...

Asian governments intervene in the world rice market to protect domestic consumers. Whether consumers are nutritionally vulnerable depends on the elasticity of calories with respect to rice prices. Common demand models applied to household survey and market price data ignore quality substitution...

This paper uses a novelty dataset of poor households in peri-urban areas in Vietnam to estimate impacts of small loans on child schooling. The Probit and Negative Binomial model estimates roughly indicate no strong evidence of the effect, especially of informal credit. Formal credit is likely to...

Whether the poor face higher food prices is unsettled in the literature after more than four decades of study. While unit values from household surveys suggest higher prices for the poor, outlet surveys typically find food prices varying with store type but not with neighborhood income. Most...

Quantile Treatment Effects are estimated to study the impacts of household credit access on health spending by poor households in one District of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. There are significant positive effects of credit on the health budget shares of households with low healthcare spending. In...

This paper uses a novel dataset collected by the first author from peri-urban areas of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2008 to examine how the poor use their loans, and factors affecting their credit participation and credit constraints. The paper finds the presence of many commercial banks in the...

There is debate about whether microfinance has positive impacts on education and health for borrowing households in developing countries. To provide evidence for this debate we use a new survey designed to meet the conditions for propensity score matching (PSM) and examine the impact of...

A common phenomenon about transition economies is that the return to schooling improves as economic reform progresses. Existing research suggests that Vietnam is not an exception to the pattern. However, the rate of return for the period 1992-1998 is still relatively low, below 5%, relative to...

A common phenomenon about transition economies is that the return to schooling improves as economic reform progresses. Existing evidence suggests that Vietnam is not an exception to the pattern. However, the rate of return for the period 1992 to 1998 is still low relative to that of the world...

Whether there is a poverty penalty, in terms of food prices, is unsettled in the literature after more than four decades of study. Unit values from household surveys suggest that prices vary with income while outlet surveys typically find food prices varying with store type but not with...