Poverty in Vietnam tends to be seen as a rural phenomenon; but following a period of rapid urbanisation, it is becoming a significant issue in urban areas. Vietnam is urbanising rapidly. The urban population grew by 3.4 per cent every year between 1999 and 2009, compared to only 0.4 per cent in rural areas. The urban population is forecast to reach 45 per cent of the total population by 2020 – a major increase on the 30 per cent registered in the 2009 Housing and Population Census. In the light of this rapid change, there is a growing need to...

This chapter will discuss key approaches and associated findings on urban poverty in Vietnam, based on the up-to-date studies described above which complement current urban poverty measurements. As almost all urban people have to buy food and other necessities, the complementary studies outlined above all confirm that the official poverty lines, though raised in 2010, remain low in the context of the rising cost of living in urban areas. Empirical measures from the Urban Poverty Survey in 2009 (or the "UPS-09") sample show that the average monthly expenditure of one person of the lowest-income quintile in Hanoi and HCMC had...

Although income-based poverty has remained substantially low, quality of life in urban areas is still limited in many respects, particularly in access to social protection, housing services, education and health care. The findings of the complementary assessments described in this paper show that measures of poverty based on income and expenditure poverty lines alone do not seem to be effective for urban areas, especially in big cities like Hanoi and HCMC. A comprehensive, multi-dimensional approach appears to be more suitable, in which people’s living standards are measured based on a number of economic and social dimensions. Poverty reduction programmes and...