Jonathan Pincus and John Sender (2008) Surveying employment for the study of poverty

'Like poverty studies in the United States, the conventional approach favors demographic and geographical explanations and downplays the role of class and gender discrimination in the labor market... Yet the structure of Vietnam Living Standard Survey (VLSS)/Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) questionnaires precludes a serious consideration of the role of wage employment in reducing poverty.'

'More information on wage and other forms of employment is needed to gain a better understanding of poverty dynamics in Vietnam, as elsewhere. Priority should be given to the implementation of a comprehensive labor force survey that accounts for seasonality and collects information on wages, working conditions, security, sectoral composition, skill acquisition, mobility, and women's position in the labor market. Surveys focusing on women working as casual and seasonal agricultural wage laborers and as domestic servants are urgently needed to make antipoverty programs more relevant to the needs of the poor. In our estimation these surveys should be assigned a higher priority than the production of poverty headcounts based on detailed expenditure surveys. Not only are these estimates notoriously error prone, but they also provide only limited information on the causes of poverty. In the absence of detailed labor market information, government officials, aid donors, and academics have tended to overemphasize individual household characteristics and geography at the expense of the structural features of the economy that condition most people's access to better paid and more stable employment.' 

Jonathan Pincus and John Sender (2008) Quantifying Poverty in Vietnam: Who Counts? Link

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