Multidimensional Child Poverty in Vietnam from a Longitudinal Perspective—Improved Lives or Impoverished Conditions?

Despite a rapid expansion of the bodies of research on the measurement of multidimensional poverty, chronic poverty and child poverty, little attention has been paid to the longitudinal aspects of multidimensional poverty. Even less evidence is available about longitudinal multidimensional child poverty. This paper combines these strands of research, using household survey data from 2004, 2006 and 2008 from Vietnam to analyze cross-sectional poverty trends and longitudinal poverty dynamics. The purpose of this study is three-fold as it (i) examines the lives of children in Vietnam and considers changes in their living conditions in the first decade of the 21st century; (ii) assesses various hypotheses drawn from the chronic multidimensional poverty literature; and (iii) presents an explorative study of the investigation of child poverty from a longitudinal perspective using a multidimensional approach. Main conclusions suggest that the large reduction of child poverty in Vietnam has been unequal and that a sizeable proportion of children remain locked into poverty. Theoretically, this paper finds that characteristics of chronic versus transient poor children are similar and that the association between poverty depth and duration is not strong enough to consider one measure a proxy for the other.