This paper discusses the progress that Vietnam has made toward meeting a core set of development goals that the government recently adopted as part of its Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (CPRGS). These goals are strongly related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but are adapted and expanded to reflect Vietnam's national challenges and the government's ambitious development plans. For each Vietnam Development Goal, the authors describe recent trends in relation to the trajectories implied by the MDGs, outline the intermediate targets identified by the government, and discuss the challenges involved in meeting these. Relative to other countries of similar per capita expenditures, Vietnam has made rapid progress in a number of key areas. Poverty has halved over the 1990s, enrollment rates in primary education have risen to 91 percent (although there is a quality problem), indicators of gender equity have been strengthened, child mortality has been reduced, maternal health has improved, and real progress has been made in combating malaria and other communicable diseases. In contrast, Vietnam scores worse than other comparable countries in the areas of child malnutrition, access to clean water, and combating HIV/AIDS. A number of important crosscutting issues emerge from this analysis that need to be addressed. One such challenge is improving equity, both in terms of ensuring that the benefits of growth are distributed evenly across the population and in terms of access to public services. This will involve addressing the affordability of education and curative health care for poor households. Improvements in public expenditure planning are needed to align resources better to stated desired outcomes and to link nationally-defined targets to subnational planning and budgeting processes. There is also a need to address capacity and data gaps which will be crucial for effective monitoring. This paper--a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit, East Asia and Pacific Region--is part of a larger effort in the region to help governments move toward outcome-based planning for poverty reduction.

How do Vietnamese households live and work? This book answers many of the most important questions, including: Who uses contraceptives? Which children get the most health care? Who are the poor, and why are they poor? Which families migrate? Why do so many rural workers change jobs? Where do households get credit? What drives rice production? The result of a unique collaboration between Vietnamese and international social scientists, the fourteen concise chapters paint a fascinating picture of household health and wealth. All are based on the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, the most accurate and complete source of data available. The use of statistical techniques in every chapter gives the book added coherence while providing depth and clarity to the analysis. A must for anyone with a serious interest in Vietnam, this highly readable book is also designed to serve as a reference work.

September 1998 The very principles on which Vietnam's highly decentralized, community-based assistance and safety net system is built are threatened by the country's emerging market economy. Increasing household mobility, without which the market system cannot function, especially dictates a rethinking of the foundation of Vietnam's community-based safety net. Under Vietnam's former command economy, lack of household mobility ensured close community and family solidarity, and households belonged to local cooperatives that provided for the welfare of their members. Developing a reliable, effective system of redistributive transfers and safety nets to replace such faltering local institutions will be important if Vietnam is to make a successful transition to a market economy. Van de Walle uses Vietnam as a case study in rapidly assessing the strengths and weaknesses of an existing safety net when data and ex post evaluations are weak. She provides a broad qualitative assessment, identifying key issues on which knowledge must improve. Vietnam's poverty reduction program and safety net would improve, she concludes, through a strengthening of institutional structures and policies, including: * National norms for identifying the poor consistently across regions. * Survey and other instruments with which to consistently measure and monitor local needs and program performance. * Integration and coordination between subprograms, with well-defined and universal rules for local implementation. * Welfare-maximizing redistribution of resources across space so that everyone is treated equally, regardless of where they live. * More resources and attention to helping households and communities deal with covariate risk. The government's new Hunger Eradication and Poverty Reduction Program-primarily an effort to coordinate policy efforts and resources to improve the safety net's performance and cost-effectiveness-could help improve social protection by focusing on these five areas. Increasing household mobility, without which the market system cannot function, especially dictates a rethinking of the foundation of Vietnam's community-based assistance and safety net system. Household mobility makes it difficult to target the poor and mobilize community resources to help them. Heavy decentralization inhibits Vietnam's ability to provide adequate protection from covariate risks that are rising because of environmental destruction. Addressing this problem will require more national risk pooling and overcoming likely political hurdles to a reallocation of resources to Vietnam's poor and vulnerable. This paper-a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to improve social protection policies. The author may be contacted at dvandewalle@worldbank.org.

Covering global, comparative, and single-country contexts, this Research Handbook presents wide-ranging, cutting-edge research on poverty and inequality. It maps out international trends in poverty and inequality and explores the key conceptual and operational frameworks, practical analyses, and policy applications and outcomes.

With the adoption of new market-oriented policies, Vietnam has transformed itself from one of the world's poorest countries during the 1980s, into an economy with one of the highest growth rates during the 1990s. Using macroeconomic and household survey data, this publication examines a range of issues including: the causes of Vietnam's economic growth and future prospects; the impact on household welfare and poverty levels, school enrolment, child health and other socioeconomic outcomes; and the nature of poverty in Vietnam and the effectiveness of government policies for poverty reduction, drawing lessons for Vietnam and for other low-income developing countries.