The Process of Conducting Socioeconomic Research in Vietnam: An Internship with the Development and Policies Research Center (DEPOCEN)

As Vietnam continues its rapid development, its government and people will be increasingly reliant on research organizations such as the Development and Policies Research Center (DEPOCEN) to study the socioeconomic issues that demand to be addressed in the interest of the sustainable development of the country. DEPOCEN is an independent research organization that has studied issues ranging from poverty and gender equality, to business & investment environment and trade liberalization. Since its establishment in 2005, DEPOCEN has developed collaborative relationships with many other research institutions like Oxford Economics and the Korean Institute of Economic Policy, and has offered its services to a plethora of clients, including the World Bank and UNICEF. DEPOCEN not only designs and conducts research on socioeconomic issues, the organization also consults on development and its associated policies, offers trainings on skills like survey-conducting and statistical analysis, and promotes academic development. Throughout my short internship at DEPOCEN, I learned a lot about the complex process research organizations undergo in order to secure funding for their projects. I learned a great deal about the specific issues in Vietnam DEPOCEN’s work seeks to address, especially Vietnam’s income gap between males and females – its causes and explanations, the specific tendencies in which it presents itself in different positions of the wage distribution scale, and what it will look like in the future. Perhaps most importantly, I learned more about how an organization like DEPOCEN operates. I learned about teamwork, reading between the lines in order to maintain an appropriate flow within a workplace environment, and independent problem-solving, and I am so grateful for the time I spent there