Globalization and school-work choices in an emerging economy: Vietnam

Ian Coxhead and Rashesh Shrestha

Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of increased access to industrial jobs on educational attainment using data from the 2009 Vietnam Census of Population and Housing. Vietnam’s accession to the WTO, concluded in 2006, was the signal for a fourfold increase in foreign direct investment, primarily by firms seeking low-cost blue-collar labor for assembly and light manufacturing. We find that the district-level intensity of jobs in foreign-invested firms has a significant negative association with the likelihood that teenagers will be recorded as being in school, for urban males and females and (to a lesser extent) for rural females. High dropout rates in the hinterlands of booming industrial areas like Ho Chi Minh City are due in part to relatively easy access to industrial labor markets that offer almost no premium for learning acquired in high school. The decision to enter the labor force before completing high school will likely have long-term implications for the individuals themselves, and for aggregate economic growth since competitiveness in the global economy depends on sustained increases in labor productivity.

Keywords: human capital; schooling; globalization; Vietnam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F63 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-sea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://acde.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... d_shrestha_oct16.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Globalization and School–Work Choices in an Emerging Economy: Vietnam (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pas:papers:2016-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Prema-chandra Athukorala ().