The authors examine the latest quantitative evidence on disparities in living standards between and among different ethnic groups in Vietnam. Using data from the 1998 Vietnam Living Standards Survey and 1999 Census, they show that Kinh and Hoa ("majority") households have substantially higher...

Subsidized voluntary enrollment in government-run health insurance schemes is often proposed as a way of increasing coverage among informal sector workers and their families. This paper reports the results of a cluster randomized control trial in which 3,000 households in 20 communes in Vietnam...

How is public sector compensation best aligned with the market? In industrial countries a common reference is the salary paid by private employers for similar jobs (the "jobs approach"). But comparable jobs are formal, and in developing countries the relevant alternative for many public sector...

With the movement toward universal health coverage gaining momentum, the global health research community has made significant efforts to advance knowledge about the impact of various schemes to expand population coverage. The impacts on efficiency, quality, and gaps in service utilization of...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Vietnam s hospital autonomization policy to estimate its impacts on several key health sector outcomes including hospital efficiency, use of hospital care, and out-of-pocket spending. The authors use six years of panel data covering all Vietnam s...

The crash of global financial markets in 2008 caused a ripple effect on economic demand and growth worldwide. Export-oriented economies were hit particularly hard, and many governments stepped in quickly with broad-ranging stimulus programs to lessen the effects on households of rising...

In 2009, buffeted by the great recession, Thai gross domestic product fell by 2.3 percent. Using monthly data from the socio-economic surveys of 2007-2010, this paper finds, after controlling for household variables, that real consumption per capita rose in 2009 relative to 2008 for most groups,...

In Vietnam almost a quarter of adults worked in nonfarm household enterprises in 1998. Based on household panel data from the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys of 1993 and 1998, the authors find some evidence that operating an enterprise leads to greater affluence. The data show that nonfarm...