Suchergebnisse

Social stratification or the widening of income gap between the rich and the poor becomes a serious predicament whenever Asian countries experience rapid urbanization and industrialization. The author explores the urbanization of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) and the vulnerable groups created by its processes, notably, a new urban poor sector comprised of spontaneous immigrant groups. Vulnerable groups, defined as "individuals or households who have unstable lives", account for the swelling urban population, high crime incidence and social unrest. A thorough study of these groups could positively transform government policies and the public mind-set toward them. Four conditions are described as vulnerability factors: 1) weak policies of the leading party and the government, 2)problems in the household, 3) risk and sudden changes, and 4) lack of social capital. To measure social poverty, the concep.s of vulnerability and vulnerable groups are introduced as a quid pro quo of the quantitative indicator poverty line (Pl). Urbanization, through the conversion of agricultural lands into industrial and commercial zones, alters the job structure of the rural sector. Rural farmers struggle to adjust to new social circumstances. Moreover, the poor are disenfranchised of their rights to affect the government's decision-making process. The phenomenon of "virtual urban planning" emerges, as huge urban projects remain unfulfilled because of social impediments.

Although economic reform has brought remarkable progress in poverty reduction in Vietnam, the scale and depth of ethnic minority poverty in Vietnam presents one of the major challenges to achieving the targets for poverty reduction set out in the Socio-Economic Development Plan, as well as the millennium development goals. The authors first review a series of monetary and non-monetary indicators which show the living standards of the ethnic minorities are improving but still lag seriously behind those of the majority Kinh-Hoa. The minorities' lower living standards result from the complex interplay of overlapping disadvantages, which start in utero and continue until adult life. Next an analysis of the drivers of the ethnic gap, in terms of both differences in characteristics and differences in returns to those characteristics, is undertaken. Mean and quantile decompositions show that at least a half of the gap in per capita expenditure can be attributed to the lower returns to characteristics that the ethnic minorities receive. The reasons underlying such differences in returns are discussed, drawing on both quantitative analysis and the large number of qualitative studies on ethnic issues in Vietnam. Finally, some of the short and longer term policy measures which the authors believe could help to counter ethnic disadvantages in the nutrition, education, and employment sectors are discussed. The authors also emphasize the importance of promoting growth that is geographically broad and socially inclusive without which, the current disparities between the Kinh-Hoa and the ethnic minorities will continue to grow.

A 'bottom up' regional Computable General Equilibrium Model (CGE) model for Vietnam is constructed for 28 commodities and 8 regions (using a GSO input-output table for 2005). The model is used to analyze the recent dramatic increases in the world price of rice on the regional economy of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese policy response to limit exports. Although results show limited 'pro-poor' outcomes, the CGE model and a micro-simulation (using 2006 VHLSS - Vietnamese Household Living Standard Survey data) show that recent rice export quotas resulted in falls total rural savings as measured by the difference in total income less total production cost and consumption of rice. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section two provides the background and reviews existing studies in Vietnam that have tried to estimate the welfare impact of government policies in rice market. Section three describes the methods and data. The results from the CGE model and micro-simulation on household data are discussed in section four. Section five offer concluding remarks.