Protecting The Poor In Vietnam S Emerging Market Economy

September 1998 The very principles on which Vietnam's highly decentralized, community-based assistance and safety net system is built are threatened by the country's emerging market economy. Increasing household mobility, without which the market system cannot function, especially dictates a rethinking of the foundation of Vietnam's community-based safety net. Under Vietnam's former command economy, lack of household mobility ensured close community and family solidarity, and households belonged to local cooperatives that provided for the welfare of their members. Developing a reliable, effective system of redistributive transfers and safety nets to replace such faltering local institutions will be important if Vietnam is to make a successful transition to a market economy. Van de Walle uses Vietnam as a case study in rapidly assessing the strengths and weaknesses of an existing safety net when data and ex post evaluations are weak. She provides a broad qualitative assessment, identifying key issues on which knowledge must improve. Vietnam's poverty reduction program and safety net would improve, she concludes, through a strengthening of institutional structures and policies, including: * National norms for identifying the poor consistently across regions. * Survey and other instruments with which to consistently measure and monitor local needs and program performance. * Integration and coordination between subprograms, with well-defined and universal rules for local implementation. * Welfare-maximizing redistribution of resources across space so that everyone is treated equally, regardless of where they live. * More resources and attention to helping households and communities deal with covariate risk. The government's new Hunger Eradication and Poverty Reduction Program-primarily an effort to coordinate policy efforts and resources to improve the safety net's performance and cost-effectiveness-could help improve social protection by focusing on these five areas. Increasing household mobility, without which the market system cannot function, especially dictates a rethinking of the foundation of Vietnam's community-based assistance and safety net system. Household mobility makes it difficult to target the poor and mobilize community resources to help them. Heavy decentralization inhibits Vietnam's ability to provide adequate protection from covariate risks that are rising because of environmental destruction. Addressing this problem will require more national risk pooling and overcoming likely political hurdles to a reallocation of resources to Vietnam's poor and vulnerable. This paper-a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to improve social protection policies. The author may be contacted at [email protected].

The very principles on wh ...

Thirty years of Ä?ổi Má»›i (economic renovation) reforms have catapulted Vietnam from the ranks of the world’s poorest countries to one of its great development success stories. Critical ingredients have been visionary leaders, a sense of shared societal purpose, and a focus on the future. Starting in the late 1980s, these elements were successfully fused with the embrace of markets and the global economy. Economic growth since then has been rapid, stable, and inclusive, translating into strong welfare gains for the vast majority of the population. But three decades of success from reforms raises expectations for the future, as aptly captured in the Vietnamese constitution, which sets the goal of “a prosperous people and a strong, democratic, equitable, and civilized country.†? There is a firm aspiration that by 2035, Vietnam will be a modern and industrialized nation moving toward becoming a prosperous, creative, equitable, and democratic society. The Vietnam 2035 report, a joint undertaking of the Government of Vietnam and the World Bank Group, seeks to better comprehend the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. It shows that the country’s aspirations and the supporting policy and institutional agenda stand on three pillars: balancing economic prosperity with environmental sustainability; promoting equity and social inclusion to develop a harmonious middle- class society; and enhancing the capacity and accountability of the state to establish a rule of law state and a democratic society. Vietnam 2035 further argues that the rapid growth needed to achieve the bold aspirations will be sustained only if it stands on faster productivity growth and reflects the costs of environmental degradation. Productivity growth, in turn, will benefit from measures to enhance the competitiveness of domestic enterprises, scale up the benefits of urban agglomeration, and build national technological and innovative capacity. Maintaining the record on equity and social inclusion will require lifting marginalized groups and delivering services to an aging and urbanizing middle-class society. And to fulfill the country’s aspirations, the institutions of governance will need to become modern, transparent, and fully rooted in the rule of law.

The demand for workforce skills is changing in Vietnam’s dynamic economy. In addition to job-specific skills, Vietnamese employers value cognitive skills, like problem solving, and behavioral skills, like team work. This book presents an agenda of change for Vietnam’s education system to prepare workers to succeed in Vietnam’s modernizing economy.

With the adoption of new market-oriented policies, Vietnam has transformed itself from one of the world's poorest countries during the 1980s, into an economy with one of the highest growth rates during the 1990s. Using macroeconomic and household survey data, this publication examines a range of issues including: the causes of Vietnam's economic growth and future prospects; the impact on household welfare and poverty levels, school enrolment, child health and other socioeconomic outcomes; and the nature of poverty in Vietnam and the effectiveness of government policies for poverty reduction, drawing lessons for Vietnam and for other low-income developing countries.

Viet Nam's dramatic transition and growth in the 1990s have been attributed to a series of reforms, known as "doi moi," which began in the late 1980s. Economic growth of nearly 8% yearly benefited the poor and reduced poverty from 61% in 1993 to 37% in 1998. The proportionate increases in the incomes of the poorest quintile were appreciably larger than those of the top 20 or 40% of the population. This result is at variance with typical findings for other countries, which indicate that welfare gains from growth are smallest for the lowest quintile and rise with income group. The results for Viet Nam suggest that the faster the growth rate, the lesser becomes the role of distributive factors that directly influence the poor's well-being. A print on demand report.

This publication is a compilation of reports on research projects initiated, under way, or completed in fiscal year 2001 (July 1, 2000 through June 30, 2001). The abstracts cover 150 research projects from the World Bank and grouped under 11 major headings including poverty and social development, health and population, education, labor and employment, environment, infrastructure and urban development, and agriculture and rural development. The abstracts detail the questions addressed, the analytical methods used, the findings to date and their policy implications. Each abstract identifies the expected completion date of each project, the research team, and reports or publications produced.

The World Bank's research is intended to address critical issues and problems facing member governments in developing and transition economies. How can the governments of the poorest countries generate enough revenue to provide the education and health services essential to reducing poverty and promoting growth and development? How can poor countries attract investors to build the infrastructure their economies need? How can they develop systems to bring clean water to the 2 billion people without it today? How can they train teachers and bring to class the 115 million children who have not yet received any education? And how can rich countries be persuaded to lower market barriers, helping to reverse the decline in export prices for poor countries that has left them earning less from trade today than in the 1970s? These are the types of questions that are addressed in this edition of 'The World Bank Research Program: Abstracts from Current Studies'. This volume reports on research projects initiated, under way, or completed from July 2003 through June 2004. It covers 151 research projects on several broad development related issues, including agriculture, health, education, environment, infrastructure, investment climate, and more. The abstract for each project describes the questions addressed, the analytic methods used, the findings to date, and policy implications.