'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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