Anh Dang, Sidney Goldstein, and James McNally. “Internal Migration and Development in Vietnam.” The International Migration Review 31, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 312-337.
This article attempts to understand the nature of the relationship between population movement and development as Vietnam moves further away from the command economy through increased market reforms. The focus of this particular study is on migration as a response to uneven development and policy intervention and not on the consequences of migration for the purposes of national development and policy measures. The authors have identified three macro-structural changes related to the labor market that have had unintended effects on population movements in Vietnam. They are decollectivization, in which collective land was reallocated to individual families; the elimination of the subsidy system, where the government is no longer responsible for subsidies and rationing and limits on the acquisition of essential goods and residence have been lifted; and restrictions on trade and transportation in the private sector were removed. The results of their analysis on the 1989 census show that more developed provinces attract more immigrants while less developed provinces produce more outmigrants. Of those migrating, most moved to urban and industrialized areas regardless of the levels of development in the home province. These results reinforce the standard that development effects migration patterns but also proves that despite government resettlement programs, areas in which outmigration was encouraged (urban) still received large amounts of immigrants.
Jacqueline Desbarats. “Population Redistribution in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” Population and Development Review 13, no. 1 (March 1987): 43-76.
Published shortly after the implementation of doi moi in 1986, Desbarats provides an analysis of population movements (both rural-urban and urban-rural) in post-1975 Vietnam, which includes a description of the government’s population redistribution policies and an evaluation of the demographic, geographic and economic effects of these policies. Government policies for population redistribution sought to address four types of needs: economic, demographic, internal security, and external security. Economically and demographically speaking the government needed to increase agricultural output so as to avoid the high cost of transporting foods around the country—this included redistributing the labor force from densely populated areas to underpopulated areas with arable land for wet-rice agriculture. With regard to security issues, the government needed to reduce the urban population—particularly in the southern cities as potentially disruptive elements lived in the cities (e.g., Catholic refugees, former RVN military and police forces). While potential southern dissidents were moved out of southern cities, loyal northern cadres and their families were moved to southern cities and the Central Highlands to help ensure internal security for the Communist government. To ensure external security loyalists were also moved to strategic areas near Vietnam’s borders with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The author concludes that Vietnamese planners viewed cities as a threat to the nation instead of an opportunity for economic development and therefore quickly addressed urban unemployment and rural underpopulation via population redistribution from urban to rural areas. These ideological goals however undermined any effectiveness of the redistribution program because many in the urbanized southern areas resisted forced population transfers causing the government to rely on increased forms of coercion. Increased resistance resulted in agricultural outputs lowers than the expected return, thus showing that the relocation program was unsuccessful. Desbarats also shows that the redistribution program also caused approximately one million refugees to flee Vietnam because of the perceived threat of forced exile to a New Economic Zone. “Thus, the increased social control achieved by the Vietnamese government has been accomplished through international rather than internal migration, and at the cost of great human suffering, a much tarnished international image, and significant damage to the country’s development prospects.”[1]
Carl Haub and Phuong Thi Thu Huong. “An Overview of Population and Development in Vietnam.” Population Reference Bureau. http://www.prb.org/Articles/2003/AnOverviewofPopulationDevelopmentinVietnam.aspx
This 2003 report about population and development in Vietnam contains a number of useful statistics and charts/graphs. Information from the 1999 Census shows that the growth rate of Vietnam had declined to its lowest point since reunification in 1975—mostly due to many couples limiting the size of their family to two children. Despite the decline of the growth rate, Vietnam’s population density has been steadily increasing and is now one of the most densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and the world. Results of this study conclude that the migration trends that were found in the 1989 Census are continuing—people are moving from rural to urban areas as well as to the new economic zones.
Linda Hitchcox. “Relocation in Vietnam and Outmigration: The Ideological and Economic Context.” In Migration: The Asian Experience, edited by Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot, 202-220. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
This essay “examines migration in and from Vietnam, exploring the ways in which the phenomenon is constructed by participants and authorities as political ideology, as economic necessity and as a social support system” during the years 1979 and 1994.[2] Hitchcox begins with a brief discussion of the economic and political background of Vietnam during the period prior to her examination in order to situate her study within the contexts of a chaotic wartime atmosphere beginning in 1954. Hitchcox discusses state-sponsored migration through the government population programs first begun in 1975. And also gives significant attention to Nghe Tinh and Thanh Hoa as areas of significant outmigration due to the unfavorable geographic and atmosphere conditions, which often led to either low-yielding or destroyed rice crops. Another area of attention is Quang Ninh, a province that attracted much internal migration because of employment in the coal mines and also outward migration because of its proximity to Hong Kong.
Li Tana. Peasants on the Move, Rural-Urban Migration in the Hanoi Region. Singapore: ISEAS, 1996.
This study examines “the main trends, directions and patters of the population movement in the Red River Delta.”[3] Through surveys and interviews with unskilled workers in Hanoi the author seeks to determine the institutional changes that occurred in the countryside since the beginning of doi moi that allowed for voluntary migration from rural areas to urban. Li Tana’s results determined that the economic and political transitions Vietnam is experiencing are fundamentally different from “other Southeast Asian countries where the economic transition has not involved such profound changes and adjustments both by the state and its people.”[4] Patterns of Vietnam’s rural to urban migration that emerged show that the majority of migrants are driven by economic motives (underemployment, low wages); movements are typically temporary and are made predominantly by the family’s breadwinner rather than the movement of the entire family; village links are important and maintained as that is how information on family, employment, and housing is shared. Li Tana concludes that two fundamental factors shape rural to urban migration, “the fact that at present every Vietnamese peasant has a piece of land, and the residential restriction in urban areas.”[5] Due to these factors the above mentioned patterns have developed leading the researcher to conclude that rural to urban migration is both manageable and more than likely necessary for achieving national development goals.
Nigel Thrift and Dean Forbes. The Price of War: Urbanization in Vietnam 1954-85. London: Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd., 1986.
This book examines the Vietnamese experience of urbanization under socialism. Thrift and Forbes modify the general model of urbanization under socialism as outlined by Pearse Murray and Ivan Szelenyi (1984), which was intended to apply to urbanization in all socialist countries. Thrift and Forbes argue that urbanization in a socialist state differs from urbanization in a socialist developing country (e.g., Vietnam, Angola, Guyana) and therefore a new set of adjustable parameters must be developed. Thrift and Forbes stress the importance of examining the direct and indirect effects that war has had on both Vietnamese society and Vietnamese urbanization. According to the authors, the nature of Vietnamese civil society has played a strong role in the rates and patterns of urbanization—particularly following key events in Vietnamese history between 1954 and 1985. The data analyzed and subsequent analyses may be dated as this monograph was published two decades ago and since then much information that was not previously available has surfaced, but it does provide a considerable contribution to our knowledge base and provokes ideas for future research.
Heather Xiaoquan Zhang, P. Mick Kelly, Catherine Locke, Alexandra Winkels, and W. Neil Adger. “Structure and Implication of Migration in a Transitional Economy: Beyond the Planned and Spontaneous Dichotomy in Vietnam.” CSERGE Working Paper GEC 01-01.
This study is similar to the 1997 study by Anh Dang, Sidney Goldstein, and James McNally (see above) in that it links contemporary migration to development and identifies the major patterns and trends of population mobility beginning with migration under French colonial rule until post-1986 (doi moi). This study comes to the same conclusions, that “despite the state’s continued attempts to reshape the country’s population configuration and distribution over recent historical periods, the policy outcomes with respect to population mobility have been swayed as much by individuals and their families in pursuit of their own aspirations and livelihoods as by the state plans.”[6] This study is particularly interesting and informative due to its in depth examination of Vietnamese population movements beginning with French colonial rule.
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