Non-farm employment, food poverty and vulnerability in rural Vietnam

Abstract

This study sheds light on the effects of non-farm employment on household food poverty and vulnerability among rural households in Vietnam using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey of 2010. Vulnerability to food poverty constitutes a certain probability that a non-poor household will become food-poor or that a food-poor household will remain in poverty in future. The results suggest that non-farm employment exerts a positive and statistically significant effect on the reduction in household food poverty and vulnerability. Specifically, participating in non-farm employment will help decrease the probability of falling into food poverty in future by roughly 19%. We also document that 31% of non-food-poor households in rural areas suffered from vulnerability to food poverty, indicating their high probability of falling into food poverty in future. Additional results from regional evaluation suggest that the North-west region of Vietnam is most vulnerable to food poverty and has an urgent need of targeted government development policies; improving access to non-farm employment could help mitigate vulnerability.

Appendix 1: Technical note on measuring the food poverty line

This section explains the step of calculating the poverty line ($P$) used in Eqs. (1) and (2):

$$\begin{aligned} \ln f_{i} & = \omega_{1} + \omega_{2} C_{i} \\ P & = {\text{e}}^{{\widehat{{\omega_{1} }} + {\text{RDA}}\widehat{{\omega_{2} }}}} \\ \end{aligned}$$

• 1. In the first step, we convert the food consumption in kilograms into calories consumption using the food composition table constructed by Vietnam National Institute of Nutrition in 2017 (Vietnam National Institute of Nutrition 2007). With the data of VHLSS in 2010, we compute the total calorie intake (Kcal) for 38 food items, representing the food basket of each household. From this, the calories consumption ($C_{i}$) for each household are measured. The value of $C_{i}$ is then used in step 2 to regress Eq. (1) (Table 9).

  Table 9 Conversion table calories for Vietnam.

• 2. The second step is to obtain the estimates of coefficient $\omega_{2}$ and intercept $\omega_{1}$ through the regression of the function of food consumption, with calories as the explanatory variables: $\ln f_{i} = \omega_{1} + \omega_{2} C_{i}$. We thus obtain the estimates results of coefficient and intercept: $1.85 \times 10^{ - 6}$ and 2.35, respectively.

• 3. The third step is to calculate the poverty line based on the results of $\widehat{{\omega_{1} }}$ and $\widehat{{\omega_{2} }}$. Finally, we obtain $P = 10.538$ as the poverty line.