Abstract
We investigate determinants of individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with increasingly high levels of geographical labour mobility. Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey 2012 (VHLSS2012), we find that the probability of migration is strongly associated with individual, household and community-level characteristics. The probability of migration is higher for young people and those with post-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to be from households with better-educated household heads, female-headed households, and households with higher youth dependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups are much less likely to migrate, other things being equal. Using multinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broad destination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers of migration as those moving to other destinations. We also use the VHLSS2012 together with the VHLSS2010, which allows us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants—those present in the household in 2010, but who had moved away by 2012. This yields much tighter results. For education below upper secondary school, the evidence on positive selection by education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority “penalty” on spatial labor mobility remains strong and significant, even after controlling for specific characteristics of households and communes. This lack of mobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctive persistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minority populations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished.
A previous version of this paper was circulated as ‘Migration in Vietnam: New Evidence from Recent Surveys’, World Bank Group, Vietnam Country Office, World Bank Development Economics Discussion Paper No. 2, July 2015. The views expressed in this chapter are the authors’ alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank or its Executive Directors.
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- 1.
The Census identifies an individual as a migrant if he/she was at least 5 years of age at the time of the Census and had changed place of residence within the past 5 years.
- 2.
Imported from China, this system was implemented from 1955 in urban areas and nationwide from 1960. Each household is given a registration booklet that records the name, sex, date of birth, marital status, occupation, and relationship to the household head of all household members. In principle, no one can have his or her name listed in more than one household registration booklet. The ho khau is intended to be tied to the place of residence and to provide access to social services such as housing, schooling and health care in that location. As in China, in Vietnam, changing one’s registered location is a difficult and time-consuming process.
- 3.
Of course, any fully articulated model of household decision-making must also come to terms with intra-household bargaining and distribution, whether by assuming it to take a specific structure or by modelling it directly.
- 4.
There are 63 provinces and cities in Vietnam. The average area of a province or city is 5000 sq. km. As a result, workers do not need to migrate if they are working within a province or a city.
- 5.
There are no data on expenditure for the 37,000 ‘large sample’ households, but other information is as collected in the small sample.
- 6.
The Ho Chi Minh metropolitan region includes the provinces of Bình Dương, Bình Phước, Tây Ninh, Long An, Đồng Nai, Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu, Tiền Giang and Ho Chi Minh City (eight provinces).
- 7.
The Hanoi metropolitan region includes the provinces of Phú Thọ, Vĩnh Phúc, Thái Nguyên, Bắc Giang, Bắc Ninh, Hưng Yên, Hải Dương, Hà Nam, Hòa Bình and Hanoi (10 provinces).
- 8.
Skilled occupations include leaders/managers from sectors and organisations, high-level experts, and average-level experts. Semi-skilled occupations include office staff, service and sales staff, skilled labourers in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, manual labourers and related occupations, machine assembling and operating workers. Other workers are defined as unskilled.
- 9.
Many studies using MNL models report tests for the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). We conducted Hausmann and Small–Hsiao tests, and both rejected the null hypothesis that IIA holds. However, Monte Carlo studies indicate that these tests are biased towards rejection (Cheng and Long 2007). Ex ante, the choices faced in our model seem ‘plausibly … distinct and weighed independently in the eyes of each decision-maker’ (McFadden 1974). Ex post, estimates using logit models applied separately to each choice yield marginal effects that are very similar to those obtained in the MNL model (results available on request).
- 10.
A quadratic term in age was included in earlier versions, but it was insignificant and subsequently dropped.
- 11.
In other runs, we included variables recording frequency of floods, storms and droughts in the commune; however, these were insignificant in the cross-section estimates and were dropped.
- 12.
In other specifications, recent drought (in the past 3 years) was also found to be a significant stimulus to outmigration for work.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank John Giles and Hai-Anh Dang (World Bank), and Amy Liu and Xin Meng (Australian National University) for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to participants in a seminar in the IPAG Business School, Paris, France, and participants in the conference ‘Study of Rural–Urban Migration in Vietnam with Insights from China and Indonesia’ (Hanoi, Vietnam, January 2015) for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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Coxhead, I., Nguyen, V.C., Vu, H.L. (2019). Internal Migration in Vietnam, 2002–2012. In: Liu, A., Meng, X. (eds) Rural-Urban Migration in Vietnam. Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94574-3_3
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