The task of poverty reduction in Vietnam faces tremendous challenges as the remaining poor are harder to reach and the economy continues to slow, the World Bank has suggested in a new report released yesterday.
The 200-page dossier, titled "Well Begun, Not Yet Done: Vietnam's Remarkable Progress on Poverty Reduction and the Emerging Challenges," is a collaborative effort between the World Bank and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS).
It suggests that poverty has increasingly become a problem for ethnic minorities and is now more geographically concentrated.
WB Country Director Victoria Kwakwa said that the report comes at a time when the story of poverty in Vietnam is changing and monitoring systems have become outdated.
Poverty has fallen from 58 percent in 1993 to 14.5 per cent in 2008 to under 10 per cent in 2010. However, ethnic minority poverty still stood at 66.3 per cent in 2010 compared to 12.9 per cent for the majorities.
Nguyen Thang, director of the centre for analysis and forecasting at VASS, said poverty must be approached as a "dynamic" term, which means policies must go beyond targeted programs and address factors that keep households vulnerable to poverty such as job losses or natural disasters.
