World Food Policy Volume/Issue 2-2/3-1 Fall 2015/Spring 2016 | Page 113

World Food Policy

of households headed by men or women
without any school are vulnerable
to poverty. The share of vulnerable
households decreases to 46 percent and
31 percent across the higher education
attainment of the head. In addition,
only 10 percent of the heads who are
from the Kinh are illiterate, while 32
percent of the other heads cannot read
or write. Moreover, the Kinh usually live
in lowlands, which enables them to have
better access to markets and allows them
to have a lower risk of being poor.

The asset index is also believed
to be a good proxy for household wealth
(see Filmer and Pritchett 2001). It
differs significantly across population
subgroups; nonpoor households are
again owners of higher asset levels,

while stay-poor households are the least,
being 0.54 and 0.24,4 respectively. In
addition, the location of the household
can be used as a proxy for public physical
asset such as infrastructure and some
regional differences. More than half of
the households are in mountainous and
highland areas where infrastructure such
as roads, electricity, schools, and health
clinics are in poorer condition and, thus,
result in worse market access. Among
the chronically poor households, the
majority of them are in the mountainous
areas in HT where infrastructure is
usually of poor conditions, the natural
condition is hard for agricultural
production, and people are usually from
ethnic minority groups who have less
access to markets.

Figure 1 Changes in the patterns of income sources by poverty trajectory, percent
Source: Author’s calculations from Vulnerability Surveys.
Notes: Agriculture refers to income from agricultural activities; nonagricultural refers to income from
nonagricultural activities.

4

The asset index is scaled to the range of [0,1]

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