This paper examines gender inequality and female empowerment in rural Viet Nam. Using an extensive panel dataset on 2,181 households, we examine how the welfare of women living in rural areas has evolved during a period of dramatic rural transformation, 2008 - 14. We find that while the economic...

Diversification of household activities away from agriculture is a key characteristic of economic development. We examine the extent of diversification among Vietnamese households, from agriculture into waged employment and entrepreneurship and whether this diversification is welfare enhancing....

This paper explores the relationship between microcredit and poverty reduction. To investigate this question, we posit a bare-bone, household model that outlines the economic environment within which various types of family microenterprises operate. It highlights a number of issues that impinge...

Social capital and political connections can play an important role in developing countries where markets fail and institutions are weak. This paper explores their role in household micro-enterprise operation and success in the rural low-income setting of Vietnam. We propose that social capital...

If we understand well the individualization of land tenure rules under conditions of growing land scarcity and increased market integration, much less is known about the mode of evolution of the farm-cum-family units possessing the land. Inspired by first-hand evidence from West Africa, this...

This paper studies whether increasing the wife's bargaining power results in couples allocating more resources to their child, and, if so, what the underlying mechanisms for this are. We conduct a novel between-subject lab experiment in Tanzania, in which we vary the relative bargaining power...

Nigeria has recorded impressive growth in the last decade, yet the impact of this growth on poverty reduction remains unclear. This paper appraises spatial and temporal non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the first-order dominance approach. It examines five welfare indicators:...

In this paper, we aim to analyse the learning by exporting hypothesis in the Mozambican context. Due to the presence of the born-global phenomenon among exporters, we address the endogeneity introduced by self-selection by combining a generalized BO approach with results from traditional...

One feature of exporting firms in Cambodia is that they are not of domestic origin but are foreign firms that export from the moment they are established in Cambodia. In this paper we examine the extent to which the presence of foreign-owned export firms impacts on the productivity of domestic...

This paper explores the relationship between imports and firm productivity, focusing on imported intermediates. Using firm-level data on over 20,000 manufacturing firms in Viet Nam, we find evidence for competition-induced productivity gains from trade. We show that gains in intermediate sectors...