Is women's work enough to reduce poverty in Vietnam

This paper analyzes the role of women’s work in reducing poverty in Vietnam during the period of 2004-08. We use t-test to compare the equality of means of a group of family with working woman and a group of family with non-working woman using two indexes to calculate expenditure per capita: (1) expenditure per capita; (2) expenditure per equivalence of scales. Expenditure per capita is simply counting the number of people in a household while expenditure per equivalence of scale deflates expenditure by the number of children scaling by some fractions of an adult. This is our contribution to the literature since no research has used expenditure per equivalence of scale before. The determinants of poverty rates in Vietnam are also considered. The result shows that women’s work itself is not enough to reduce poverty in Vietnam. The problem of being poor mainly comes from other characteristics rather than women’s work such as husband’s wage, family’s asset, the number of years of schooling of the husband, the number of years of schooling of the wife and the age of the wife. JEL Classification: I3