Social Welfare in Vietnam: A Curse or Blessing for Poor Children?

Abstract

Despite a rapid increase in economic growth accompanied by the rise of living standards over the last two decades in Vietnam, there is still a considerable proportion of the population that lives in poor and vulnerable conditions. Children in particular are disproportionately affected by poverty. The country employs a broad range of social protection programs that tend to be regressive in effect rather than supportive of the poor. The present paper evaluates the social welfare scheme in Vietnam in terms of child poverty. We use the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) 2006 and identify and quantify child poverty in monetary as well as multidimensional terms. We consider the link between social welfare receipt and poverty and evaluate coverage, exclusion, and inclusion errors. Furthermore, we use benefit incidence analysis to evaluate the impact of social welfare on monetary child poverty. Findings suggest that coverage of the social welfare scheme is limited and that the scheme suffers from considerable exclusion and inclusion errors. Furthermore, we find that social welfare only slightly reduces the incidence and depth of monetary poverty.

The Effects of the Vietnam Hunger Eradication and Poverty Reduction Program on Schooling

“…One of the main improvements of this study with respect to previous investigations of the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs in Vietnam (van de Walle 2004ade Walle , 2004bEvans and Harkness 2008;Roelen 2010;Berg and Cuong 2011) is that we know with precision whether a family is treated or not, that is, we know if it is included in the Commune official poverty list and thus eligible to receive HEPR benefits.…”

“…As in any DID setting, identification relies on the assumption of parallel trends, which we are able to test for the pre-treatment period. More generally, the parallel trend assumption is likely to hold in our setup because of an unintended feature of HEPR: its bad targeting (see Evans and Harkness 2008;Roelen 2010). Although all families satisfying the poverty criterion set by the Ministry of Labor-Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) are supposed to receive HEPR benefits, it turns out that many non-poor households are mistakenly enlisted in the program, while some poor families are left out.…”

“…Berg andCuong 2011, andPhan et al 2017 actually find that pro-poor policies produced rather undesirable effects, such as increasing inequality. There is ample the complex nature of the program which prevents to distinguish the effects of the various interventions (van de Walle 2004ade Walle , 2004bEvans and Harkness 2008;Roelen 2010;Berg and Cuong 2011). 4 We estimate the effect of the combined HEPR measures on school enrolment by exploiting Young Lives data.…”

“…Furthermore, centrally designed programs were often underfunded, with an average annual coverage as low as $0.22 per person (van de Walle 2004a). 4 Monetary size of transfers (van de Walle 2004ade Walle , 2004bEvans and Harkness 2008) or report of transfer receipts have often been used as indicators of benefit reception (Berg and Cuong 2011;Roelen 2010). However, only a small share of the benefits provided by poverty alleviation programs comes in the form of cash: direct targeting programs more often provide in-kind transfers, exemptions and subsidies.…”