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During a time of rapid economic transformation in Vietnam, we examined two possibilities for elderly support: living together with children and receiving remittances. Our analysis used four household surveys conducted in Vietnam between 1992 and 2004. With the highly detailed 1997–1998 survey, we found that 73.1 percent of Vietnamese elderly are living with children and 34.8 percent were either receiving remittances directly or married to a recipient. From our logistic regression analysis, we determined further that living with children and remittances both serve continuing roles for elderly support, and our findings suggest that expanding the pension system in Vietnam can potentially play an important role in reducing elderly poverty without crowding out these other support mechanisms.

ABSTRACTUsing the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey in 2004, this article seeks to quantify the potential role and impacts of a social pension scheme for reducing elderly poverty in Vietnam. The authors simulate changes in the poverty rate, poverty gap and poverty severity of the elderly in the counterfactual situation that such a scheme had been introduced to Vietnam in the past. They consider a number of categorical targeting groups of elderly people along with various transfer parameters to assess the impacts of the scheme on social welfare. They conclude that, depending on the characteristics of the social pension, there would be beneficial poverty reductions, but also large leakages to the non‐poor people. For a variety of measures, the results suggest that targeting the elderly in rural areas might be the most effective use of limited resources. Simulations for different budgetary constraints show that, even with limited budgeting, a social pension scheme would significantly reduce poverty incidence for the elderly. Furthermore, for a given programme cost, combining lower benefits with lower eligibility requirements is more effective at reducing poverty than providing larger benefits to a more limited group of recipients.