Abstract
This chapter first details the objective, survey design, and steps taken to ensure the quality of data of the Vietnam Rural–Urban Migration Survey 2013 (VRUMS2013). It discusses the challenges and solutions in collecting rural–urban migration data in Vietnam. It then uses the data to provide a broad picture of various aspects of rural–urban migrants’ lives in the major destination cities: their characteristics, employment, education, reasons for migrating, their children’s education and the difficulties they encounter, as well as the different types of social protection that are recognised as important to protect migrant workers and their families.
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- 1.
The VRUMS2013 questionnaire follows the same structure as the Rural–Urban Migration in China and Indonesia (RUMiCI) survey and was conducted between 2012 and 2013.
- 2.
The VHLSS2012 is a two-stage area sample in which communes are selected in the first stage and three enumeration areas per commune are selected in the second stage. The communes are stratified according to province and urban/rural areas. The sample is then allocated over the strata proportional to the square root of the number of households according to the 2009 Census.
- 3.
The VHLSS2012 contains detailed information on individuals, households and communes, collected from households nationwide. Individual data include demographics, education, employment, health, and migration. Household data are on durables, assets, production, income and expenditure, and participation in government programs.
- 4.
‘Household head’ refers to the major contributor to the household income or the decision-maker in the household.
- 5.
The VHLSS2012 restricts the time of migration. It only covers migrants who had left their rural family since 2002. The VRUMS2013 restricts long-term migrants to those who left their rural family in the past 10 years. Hence, we experimented with restricting the samples to those rural households with migrants who had left their rural household since 2012 to make the two samples more comparable. By restricting the samples in this way, the number of these rural households that are unmatched in the VHLSS2012 but are reported in the VRUMS2013 (‘Unmatched VRUMS2013’) is 144 instead of 156, as reported in Table 1. We then repeated the mean difference test for the key characteristics, and a similar conclusion can be drawn.
- 6.
Non-contract casual refers to jobs that are longer in terms of duration and more stable than temporary jobs that can be terminated at any time. It also includes jobs without a formal contract).
- 7.
This law does not apply to health insurance, deposit insurance and types of business insurance. This was further modified by the Social Insurance Law 2014.
- 8.
Clause 2 of Article 2 states that: ‘Employers entitled to participate in compulsory social insurance include state agencies, non-business units, people’s armed force units; political organisations, socio-political organisations, socio-professional-political organisations, socio-professional organisations, other social organisations; foreign agencies and organisations, international organisations operating in the Vietnamese territory; enterprises, cooperatives, individual business households, cooperative groups, other organisations and individuals hiring, employing and paying wages to labourers.’
- 9.
While individuals can participate in voluntary social insurance schemes by paying an insurance premium, the enrolment rate tends to be low among migrants as they tend to have low pay and face job uncertainty.
- 10.
http://www.ilo.org/dyn/ilossi/ssimain.viewScheme?p_lang=en&p_scheme_id=3037&p_geoaid=704 (last accessed 16 May 2017).
- 11.
Regarding the education of migrants’ children, the conclusions drawn from the VRUMS2013 are quite different from those from other surveys (see chapter “Differences in Consumption Patterns Between Urban and Rural Migrant Households in Vietnam”). The VRUMS2013 children have a higher rate of school attendance and more children in the VRUMS2013 attend public schools. The small number of children in the sample may have a role to play (see Footnote 12).
- 12.
Several factors may give rise to this result. It may be due to the small number of children living with their family in the city, or some migrants may have connections that enable them to enrol their children in public school. In addition, local governments may take the initiative to enrol migrant children in public schools to promote universal education (Demombynes and Vu 2016; see chapter “Rural–Urban Migration in Vietnam: Trend and Institutions”).
- 13.
Nonfood expenditure consists of all expenditure for the daily life of the household, including clothing, household appliances and services (not including fixed assets), medical care, transport and communications, recreation, education and cultural services, miscellaneous goods and services, etc.
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Nguyen, M.H., Dang, D.A., Liu, A.Y.C. (2019). Study of Rural–Urban Migration in Vietnam: The Survey. In: Liu, A., Meng, X. (eds) Rural-Urban Migration in Vietnam. Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94574-3_2
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