Migration in Vietnam

The authors investigate determinants of
individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with
increasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility.
Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards
Survey (VHLSS) of 2012, the authors find that 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 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 to those moving to other destinations. The authors
also use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allows
us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants, those
present in the household in 2010, but who have 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.