Steve Bass et al. (2010) Viet Nam’s development priorities to date aim at high rates of economic growth – but in ways that constrain integration of environment objectives

The prevailing development narrative in Viet Nam is to achieve middle-income status through economic growth, under conditions that (it is assumed) will also reduce poverty en route. This is in spite of environmental damage becoming apparent and export markets increasingly demanding sustainably produced goods. Viet Nam’s market orientation excites competition between provinces to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), which continues to drive a ‘race to the bottom’ in ignoring environmental standards; state-owned enterprises (SOEs) continue to ‘steal from the future’ by polluting air and water. Heavy costs are imposed on the environment, with much natural resource degradation and pollution, which in turn explains much entrenched poverty. The National Environmental Performance Assessment (n.d.) is consequently gloomy, noting how water and air quality having been static or deteriorating and big losses of biodiversity in particular.

Environment is not central to the economic growth philosophy, except that poverty is seen to be a cause of environmental degradation. Indeed, environmental problems are sometimes attributed explicitly to some ethnic minorities – suggesting that changing the resource use practices of poor people should be the priority. Various policy documents suggest that environmental protection to make up for recent ‘environment sacrifices’ can be ‘afforded’ only once middle-income status is achieved.

The ‘economic growth first’ narrative creates great pressure to ignore environmental considerations at all levels. Production, income and economic growth are the top targets by which officials will be assessed. The associated quantitative indicators are compelling and the lack of similar quantitative environment indicators does nothing to balance the growth incentive. Furthermore, the honourable notion of ‘victory means sacrifice’ would seem to justify acceptance of the idea of sacrificing environment in the medium term – why create only one ‘green job’ if two ‘polluting jobs’ can be created today and the resultant income used to clean up associated environmental damage later? This short-term drive for growth may indeed be efficient if environmental assets can later be rebuilt, or if environmental hazards did no lasting harm, but this is not always the case. Unlike Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other neighbours, Viet Nam’s environment was already highly degraded before the growth spurt of the 2000s. Without significant change, the likely outcome of continued degradation may resemble China’s – with its huge social costs.

Steve Bass, David Annandale, Phan Van Binh, Tran Phuong Dong,Hoang Anh Nam, Le Thi Kien Oanh, Mike Parsons, Nguyen Van Phuc,and Vu Van Trieu (2010) Integrating environment and development in Viet Nam: Achievements, challenges and next steps

Jane Fisher, Thach Duc Tran, Trang Thu Nguyen, Tuan Tran (2012) Common perinatal mental disorders and alcohol dependence in men in northern Viet Nam

This study is to our knowledge the first to establish the prevalence and correlates of common perinatal disorders and alcohol dependence in men in a low or lower-middle income country and in Viet Nam.

We found that the prevalence of PCMD [perinatal common mental disorders of depression and anxiety] in men(17.7%) was less than that in women in this setting (29.9%) (Fisher et al., 2010), but that alcohol dependence, which was not found in women, was widespread in men in both rural and urban areas (33.8%).

The prevalence of any depressive disorder in men in this study (12.6%) is higher than the pooled prevalence in high-income countries (9%) (Paulson and Bazemore, 2010) and much higher than in the studies which used the same diagnostic assessment in well-resourced Asian countries:Singapore(1.8%) (Cheeetal.,2004) and HongKong(3.1%) (Laietal.,2010).

As others have found, alcohol dependence was highest among men occupying the lowest socioeconomic position.

Non-psychotic mental health problems in men have been neglected not only in Viet Nam but also in other resource-constrained countries. The results of this study suggest strongly that perinatal mental health problems represent a significant public health concern not only among women but also among men in northern Viet Nam. These data suggest that interventions should not be confined to women, but should also include men and should be combined with community-based strategies to reduce alcohol misuse and family violence

Jane Fisher, Thach Duc Tran, Trang Thu Nguyen, Tuan Tran (2012) Common perinatal mental disorders and alcohol dependence in men in northern Viet Nam, Journal of Affective Disorders 140: 97-101

Jane R.W. Fisher, Huong Thu Thi Tran and TuanTran (2007) Mental health during and after pregnancy and links to socioeconomic conditions

There is emerging evidence that poor mental health is common in women in the postpartum year in Vietnam. Two detailed investigations using psychological autopsies to investigate maternal deaths (defined as those occurring during pregnancy or up to 42 days postpartum) in ten provinces have found that 8% to 16.9% are by suicide, which is exceptionally high by world standards [16,17]. Fisher et al. [18] found that 32.7% of 506 women attending immunisation clinics with their six week old babies scored in the clinical range of >12 on a translated and culturally verified version of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale [EDS] and 19% expressed explicit ideas that they did not want to go on living. Tran Tuan et al. [19] found that 20% of the 2000 mothers of six to eighteen month old infants surveyed for the Vietnam arm of the Young Lives Project, an investigation of childhood poverty, met screening criteria for psychiatric clinical caseness on the locally validated WHO SRQ 20. Both of these studies surveyed representative samples of women who had recently given birth. Given that depression during pregnancy is a risk factor for depression after childbirth, these data indicate that antenatal depression might also be common in Vietnamese women.

[In this study's cohort] higher EDS scores indicating lower mood were associated with psychological and social adversity including experiencing criticism and coercion in the intimate partnership, overcrowded living conditions, low security of employment and unwelcome pregnancy. Although few women reported symptoms of sufficient severity to suggest clinically significant disturbance, these data indicate that these factors may contribute cumulatively to causing more severe mood disturbance and associated disability.

Jane R.W. Fisher, Huong Thu Thi Tran and TuanTran (2007) Relative socioeconomic advantage and mood during advanced pregnancy in women in Vietnam,  International Journal of Mental Health Systems 1: 3

Catherine Locke, Nguyễn Thị Ngân Hoa and Nguyễn Thị Thanh Tâm (2012) The plights of low-income migrants: family, marriage, children upbringing

'Low-income migrants acknowledge that spousal separation impinges on marital affection and conjugal intimacy but have to put their anxieties aside in the face of needing to secure their families’ economies. Mai says “We are rural people, what can I say about love? . . . We did not think about love or our emotions.”'

Catherine Locke, Nguyễn Thị Ngân Hoa and Nguyễn Thị Thanh Tâm (2012) Struggling to Sustain Marriages and Build Families Mobile Husbands/Wives and Mothers/Fathers in Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City,  Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 7(4): 63-91

Phillip Taylor (2007) State attitude towards rural people and ethnic minorities

'... in the government's suite of programs for rural development, the state is responsive to other interests as well: donors such as the Australian and US governments and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, which offer aid conditional on the adoption of market-based policies. There are strong indications that these interests—and those of an increasingly assertive urban middle class—have captured the voice of government, whose approach to rural development today embodies a mix of deference toward universally applicable laws of development and a paternalistic attitude toward rural people. This attitude is especially evident in depictions of rural people in official development reports as poor, backward, remote, unconnected, unaware, and dependent on the state for their uplift. It is most blatantly revealed in official attitudes toward ethnic minorities, including Khmer people..., whose “backward” customs, religious orientations, and cultural insularity are deemed to impede the operation of markets and of state programs, the beneficial effects of which are taken for granted.'

Phillip Taylor (2007) Poor policies, wealthy peasants: alternative trajectories for rural development in Vietnam

Tran Thi Que (2014) Gender inequality and wealth inequality in access to funds

'In order to satisfy the demand for funds, the government furnishes credits to households through the Vietnamese Bank of Agriculture (VBA)... [M]ore than 90 per cent of loans are given to men, and households of the upper middle-strata are the dominant borrowers.

Apart from the Vietnamese Bank of Agriculture, there are share banks and credit cooperatives. Their loan facilities, however, are small and the interest charged is much higher than that of the VBA. Again, poor households and women have difficulties in borrowing from these financial organizations.

In some cases, credits from international organizations are quite attractive to Vietnamese because these organizations follow simple and flexible rules... These credits certainly favour women, but they reach neither poor households nor households in the mountains and remote areas.

Since most poor households have no access to official credits, they are forced to borrow from the informal credit system at very high interest rates... Most borrowers in this category are women, although many men also have to borrow on these terms in order to cover expenses for gambling or drinking.'

Tran Thi Que (2014) Gender Issues in Vietnam's Development, in Carolyn Gates, Irene Noerlund, Vu Cao Dam (Eds.) Vietnam in a Changing World Link

World Bank (2012) Welfare for people in extreme poverty

'Existing poverty and social protection programs provide only partial coverage and limited benefits to poor and at-risk individuals. In 2010, only half of the extreme poor were eligible for benefits under the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs (MOLISA).'

World Bank (2012) Well begun, not yet done: Vietnam's remarkable progress on poverty reduction and the emerging challenges Link

Edwin Shanks, Cecilia Luttrell, Tim Conway, Vu Manh Loi and Judith Ladinsky (2004) Poor people's participation in mass organisations

'[T]he mass organisations are often depicted as the means by which the Party and state have been able to extend supervision and control into different social spheres, to promote its power at the grassroots, and to preempt any challenges from the non-state groups (Koh 2001b: 280). Such organisations, it is argued, exist as “instruments of top down control, despite playing lip service to be representative of group interests” (Tran Thi Thu Trang 2002:12). Even if the mass organisations do serve a bottom-up, representative role, they may not necessarily represent the interests of the poor. Many of the very poor do not join mass organisations, the structures of which are weakest in the poorest areas of the country (Fritzen 2002). In this light, reliance on the mass organisations as channels of information sharing, consultation and representation of the poor is problematic (World Bank 2000).'

Edwin Shanks, Cecilia Luttrell, Tim Conway, Vu Manh Loi and Judith Ladinsky (2004) Understanding pro-poor political change: the policy process - Vietnam Link

Linda Murray (2012) Link between poverty and postnatal depression in Central Vietnam

'[This study finds] [b]eing classed as poor was significantly associated with both higher [Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale] scores and lower wellbeing ([World Health Organisation Wellbeing Scale] score) in multivariable general linear models. Being classed as poor has also significantly associated with maternal mental health disorders in studies in the North and South of Vietnam (Fisher et al. 2004; Fisher et al. 2010). A large community based study of 2000 adults in Hue city also found an inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and depression (V. D. K. Doan 2011).

... Qualitative phases of the study elucidated the reasons women thought socioeconomic status was important to maternal health... In-depth interviews revealed women were acutely aware of small differences in socioeconomic status between members of their community. Also, they worried about having enough money to bring up their children 'the same as other people.' As one mother quoted 'I have to earn money to bring up my child as equal to other people.''

Linda Murray (2012) PhD thesis: Postnatal Depression in Central Vietnam Link

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

Tran Hai Hac (2008) Critique of World Bank's pro-poor growth

'Tất nhiên, xoá đói giảm nghèo, trợ giúp người cực nghèo là một hoạt động có ích, cần thiết, cấp bách, cho dù qui mô của nó khiêm tốn. Song không thể không nhận xét rằng hoạt động này được mọi xã hội sử dụng như bình phong để che đậy và không bàn đến vấn đề bất bình đẳng và bất công trong xã hội. Hay nói cách khác, tăng trưởng 'vì người nghèo' giống như việc làm từ thiện của người giàu: nó có chức năng xã hội là duy trì và tái sản xuất những quan hệ xã hội bất công, phi bình đẳng. Về mặt này, Việt Nam, chí ít cho đến nay, không phải là một ngoại lệ.'

Trần Hải Hạc (2008) Tăng trưởng 'vì người nghèo': World Bank và 'câu chuyện thành công' của Việt Nam Link

Adam Fforde (2011) Critique of poverty measurement

'The Vietnamese experience suggests that the core problems of poverty of the current decade are precisely to do with power asymmetries and exclusion that are linked to structures that lead to groups ‘lower down the food chain’ having lives that are measured as having, relatively speaking, low incomes but high levels of health and education. This creates a stable ‘syndrome’, within which the usual mechanisms of stigmatisation (such as of  ‘backward’ ethnic groups) may come into play.'

Adam Fforde (2011) Vietnam: a discussion of poverty, its measurement and likely causes, with special reference to agriculture Link