Multidimensionl Poverty and The Role of Social Capital in Poverty Alleviation Among Ethnic Groups in Rural Vietnam: A Multilevel Analysis

Abstract

This paper empirically examines the disparities over time across six dimensions of poverty (monetary, education, health, housing, basic services, and durable assets) between ethnic minority and majority households in rural Vietnam. Using the five-wave panel data of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) 2008–2016, we observe improvements in most non-monetary dimensions of poverty for both ethnic groups, while the monetary dimension shows the highest degrees of deprivation and the lowest rate of decrease during the studied period. Health is the only dimension in which ethnic minority households are not only better off than those of majority households during the studied period, but also report improvement. We further explore the role of social capital in ethnic minorities and non-minorities at household and community levels in multiple dimensions of poverty by employing multilevel models. Our study reports the significant effects social capital have at the community level on reducing poverty in the monetary, education, housing, and basic services dimensions for ethnic minorities, while social capital at the household level shows significant effects on monetary, basic services, and durable assets. These findings indicate that policy makers ought to consider the role of social capital when designing poverty alleviation strategies for the country.

Research on farmers’ households credit behavior and social capital acquisition

“…Farmer households’ total social capital index has a positive and significant impact on credit through different channels. Therefore, it is confirmed once again that the influence of each dimension should be specifically analyzed when analyzing the influence of social capital on farmer households’ credit channels ( Pham and Mukhopadhaya, 2022 ).…”

Impact of Social Capital on Chinese Migrant Workers' Poverty during COVID-19: The Mediation of Social Protection

“…Social capital is intangible and re ects the resources people can access to create value through interaction, cooperation and coordination (Priyanath and Lakshika, 2020;Tahmasebi and Askaribezayeh, 2021). Previous studies have found that social capital can alleviate poverty through various approaches, such as promoting resource sharing (Pham and Mukhopadhaya, 2021;Weber et al, 2013), decreasing information asymmetry (Hong and Tisdell, 2017), and lowering transaction costs (Harrison et al, 2019;Priyanath and Lakshika, 2020). Few studies concern migrant workers' social capital and poverty state.…”

“…Poverty level is the dependent variable in our study and is measured from the multidimensional perspective. Based on the MPI Questionnaire proposed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), some scholars have developed multidimensional poverty indicators based on the living conditions in the target area (Chen et al, 2019;Pham and Mukhopadhaya, 2021), such as life quality, economic condition, abilities and development opportunities. Considering the migrant workers' characteristics, we measure migrant workers' multidimensional poverty level from three dimensions: economic status, abilities, and social inclusion.…”

“…In addition, poverty is multidimensional, though most studies focus on the relationship between social capital and unidimensional poverty, such as using income (Heizmann and Böhnke, 2016;Lukasiewicz et al, 2019) or expenditure (Islam & Alam, 2018;Ma et al, 2020) to measure poverty. Some scholars recently explored the relationship between social capital and poverty from the multidimensional poverty perspective (Cheng et al, 2022;Osei and Zhuang, 2020;Pham and Mukhopadhaya, 2021), and the results are inclusive. For example, Osei and Zhuang (2020) found that social capital can alleviate multidimensional poverty from the perspective of women's entrepreneurship and social innovation.…”

Exploring the Development of Poverty Eradication Efforts in Southeast Asia: A Scientometric Perspective

“…In Indonesia, it is more about business development through funding assistance, institutional strengthening, strengthening regional income, and education [9, 10,[19][20][21][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. In Vietnam, it is more about developing human resources, and providing funding facilities [22][23][24][25][26][27]. In Philippines, focused on social relation and creating community support system [28], while in Malaysia it is more focused on IT [29].…”