Title: Return to education in Vietnam during the recent transformation

Authors: Tinh Doan; John Gibson

Addresses: Economic Development Policy Branch, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 33 Bowen Street, Wellington 6011, New Zealand ' Department of Economics, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand

Abstract: A common phenomenon about transition economies is that the return to schooling improves as economic reform progresses. Existing evidence suggests that Vietnam is not an exception to the pattern. However, the rate of return for the period 1992 to 1998 is still low relative to that of the world and of other transitional economies. To provide up-to-date estimates of the return and to test whether the return to schooling in Vietnam is rising and reaches other transitional economies' rate of return, we re-examine the return in Vietnam from 1998 until before the current global economic crisis when the reforms have had a longer time to have an effect. We apply the OLS and Heckman selection estimators and find that the return has increased quickly during the later economic reform period but its pace has slowed down when the return reached the global average rate.

Keywords: economic transition; schooling returns; Heckman correction; James Heckman; selection bias; Vietnam; transition economies; economic reforms; transitional economies; OLS; ordinary least squares; linear regression; selection estimators; return rates; education economics; educational development.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEED.2012.052322

International Journal of Education Economics and Development, 2012 Vol.3 No.4, pp.314 - 329

Received: 04 Oct 2012
Accepted: 21 Dec 2012
Published online: 23 Aug 2014 *

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