Vietnam

Many education systems around the world have reached nearly universal access to schooling, but ensuring high quality learning for all students has proven to be more difficult to achieve. Results-based financing (RBF) has the potential to transform the way in which education systems improve by incentivizing students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and other stakeholders to achieve better results. RBF mechanisms work by linking financial incentives to measurable results such as school attendance, dropout rates, student test scores, or other indicators of education quality.

Education is central to the development of human capital. Vietnam has made significant progress. This paper reviews existing research on the returns to education and makes the case for investment in schooling. In Vietnam, the returns to schooling are 10 percent overall. The returns to primary and secondary education have declined over time and are lower than the regional average. The returns to secondary education are low, but not much lower than the regional average. The returns to tertiary education are high, have increased considerably, and are about 20 percent.

Very few studies currently exist on the long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing countries. This paper examines the impacts -- half a century later -- of a mass education program conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during the First Indochina War. Difference-in-difference estimation results suggest that school-age children who were exposed to the program obtained significantly higher levels of education than their peers who were residing in French-occupied areas.

This paper uses Labor Force Survey data to assess key aspects of the labor market in Vietnam over 2007-14. The analysis finds large growth in wage employment in the foreign-owned and domestic private sectors. However, the state sector remains a major employer, particularly for workers with higher education, employing 70 percent of wage workers with a university degree. Low-skilled occupations dominate the stock of existing jobs, but the top growing occupations overwhelmingly belong to high-skilled categories.

The Vietnam Escuela Nueva (VNEN) program incorporates and integrates several innovative and globally recognized practices including: (a) Participative and collaborative learning; (b) Self-paced learning guides; (c) Student government; (d) Formative assessment; (e) Application or real-life oriented learning, with community integration; and (f) Teacher professional networks. The combination of these elements is intended to spur a transformative and powerful learning experience that produces the kinds of new skills and competencies expected of children in the 21st century.

Given its modest position as a lower-middle-income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardized test scores, school enrollment, and completed years of schooling. This paper provides an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance, from an institutional viewpoint and by analyzing several data sources, some of which have rarely been used. The study finds that Vietnam has significantly increased school enrollment at all school levels in the past 20 years, and has achieved virtually universal primary school enrollment.

Since the early 1990s, the government of Vietnam (GoV) has made sustained and successful efforts to improve basic education outcomes. The percentage of the population aged 25–55 years without any level of educational attainment decreased from 23 percent in 1992 to less than one percent in 2008. In 2010, the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) signed its first grant agreement in the education sector.