Multidimensional Poverty: First Evidence from Vietnam

This study examines multidimensional poverty in Vietnam using the method of Alkire and Foster (2007, 2011) and household data from Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys 2010 and 2012. The poverty is analyzed in five dimensions including health, education, insurance and social support, living condition, and social participation. The result shows that multidimensional poverty has decreased slightly during the 2010-2012 period. There is a large difference between multidimensional poverty and expenditure/income based poverty. While Northern Mountain is the poorest region in terms of income or expenditure, Mekong River Delta is the poorest region in terms of multidimensional poverty. The decomposition analysis shows that the ethnic minority group has a small proportion of population but contributes largely to the national multidimensional poverty. We also decompose the total multidimensional poverty into the contribution of five dimensions. It finds that the deprivation of dimension ‘Social insurance and social assistance’ contributes the most to the total poverty, while the deprivation of dimension ‘Living conditions’ contributes the least to the total poverty.