Longer lives and fertility far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman are leading to rapid population aging in many countries. Many observers are concerned that aging will adversely affect public finances and standards of living. Analysis of newly available National Transfer Accounts data for 40 countries shows that fertility well above replacement would typically be most beneficial for government budgets. However, fertility near replacement would be most beneficial for standards of living when the analysis includes the effects of age structure on families as well as governments. And fertility below replacement would maximize per capita consumption when the cost of providing capital for a growing labor force is taken into account. While low fertility will indeed challenge government programs and very low fertility undermines living standards, we find that moderately low fertility and population decline favor the broader material standard of living

Living arrangements and family support for older persons have become an increasingly important policy concern in developing and rapidly aging Asia. Formulating a sound elderly care policy for the region will benefit from empirically examining how living arrangements, particularly coresidence, and intergenerational exchanges of financial, instrumental, and emotional support are associated with old-age psychological health. This study analyzes data from nationally representative aging surveys in Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand for 2011-2012 to offer a comparative perspective from Southeast Asia where various kinship systems coexist. Results suggest that coresidence with a child of culturally preferred gender significantly improves the emotional health of Vietnamese and Thai elders but with different implications. In Vietnam, living with a married son is more beneficial to parents' psychological wellbeing than living with other children. In Thailand, coresidence regardless of the child's gender improves old-age psychological wellbeing but living with a daughter brings greater benefits than living only with son. Evidence points to the importance of understanding the dominant kinship system that may shape normative filial expectations and gender role expectations within the family. In Vietnam and Thailand, the positive association holds even after intergenerational support is controlled, suggesting that the value of culturally preferred coresidence goes beyond practical functions. In Myanmar, there are almost no significant differences in psychological wellbeing among elderly across various living arrangements, except between coresidence and network living arrangements. For all settings, we do not find evidence in support of network family arrangements as a complete substitute for coresidence in terms of promoting old-age psychological wellbeing after filial support is controlled. Our study highlights important cultural nuances for theorizing the nature of the relationship between living arrangements and old-age psychological health, and presents the important need for more rigorous investigation of the causal links between these two phenomena in future research.

By using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey in 2004, this paper seeks to quantify the potential role and impacts of a social pension scheme for reducing elderly poverty in Vietnam. We simulate how the poverty rate, poverty gap, and poverty severity of the elderly would have been changed in the counterfactual situation that such a scheme had been introduced to Vietnam in the past. We 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. We find 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, our results suggest that targeting the elderly in rural areas might be the most effective use of limited resources. Also, simulations for different budgetary constraints show that, even with limited budgeting, a social pension scheme would significantly reduce poverty incidence for the elderly. For example, the elderly poverty gap could be reduced by almost 60 percent with a program that costs one percent of GDP.

This paper estimates and compares efficiency performance of 32 commercial banks in Vietnam during 2001–2005, as well as identifies possible factors determining such efficiency performance. Efficiency is measured by a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and super-efficiency measure through a slacks-based model (SBM) under the assumption of variable returns to scale (VRS). We find that there were a small number of efficient banks, and there would be room for these banks to improve their production efficiency. Moreover, in comparison with small banks, large banks do not guarantee high super efficiency scores. The results from a Tobit regression model provide such interesting findings as negative impact of state ownership, positive influence of bank size and market share, but no impact of labor quality.

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.