Lost in Transition? Declining Returns to Education in Vietnam

Abstract

There is evidence of a rapid increase in the returns to education in Vietnam in the 1990s and 2000s. There was a substantial change in education policy in the 2000s, especially opening up education opportunities for education providers to expand educational facilities and training.These changes could lead to a decline in the returns to education. To provide up-to-date estimates of the returns, we re-visit the returns using updated large-scale survey data to 2014.

Heterogeneous impacts of provincial governance on household welfare in Vietnam

“…Keeping all other factors constant, Model 1 shows that on average, an additional year of schooling would raise per capita income by about 500,000 VND (23.80 USD). This result accords with recent findings in Vietnam (Doan, Le, & Tran, ; Tran ; Tran et al, ). Nevertheless, the estimates in Model 2 and Figure show that the effect tended to be greater for higher quantiles, suggesting that there turn on education is higher for better‐off households.…”

Puzzle me this? The Vietnamese reverse gender education gap

“…At this level of aggregation, there is no indication that the convergence and subsequent reversal of gender education gaps payed off for women in Viet Nam. This is consistent with estimates of the conditional gender earnings gap showing no signs of decreasing during the same period (Oostendorp and Doan 2013;Doan et al 2018). From the perspective of this paper, these results show no discernible link between gender differences in returns and enrolments.…”

The role of education in the livelihood of households in the Northwest region, Vietnam

“…Standard linear regression techniques (e.g., ordinary least squares or fixed/random effects estimators) have been commonly used for considering the effect of education on household income or wage income (e.g., Doan et al, 2018;Lekobane & Seleka, 2017;Psacharopoulos & Patrinos, 2004;Tran, 2015). This mean approach looks at the average relationship between education and economic welfare based on the conditional mean of the outcome distribution.…”

“…Over the last decades, Vietnam's focused investments in developing primary education, combined with greater access to all levels, have paid off, and have enabled an increasing proportion of the population to exploit the advantages of expanding economic opportunities (WB, 2015). Numerous studies have found positive effects from education, among other factors, on poverty reduction and household income (Cloutier, Cockburn, & Decaluwé, 2008;Nguyen, Phung, & Westbrook, 2015) and wage income (Doan, Le, & Tran, 2018).…”