The authors investigate determinants ofindividual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country withincreasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility.Using data from the Vietnam Household Living StandardsSurvey (VHLSS) of 2012, the authors find that probability ofmigration is strongly associated with individual, householdand community-level characteristics. The probability ofmigration is higher for young people and those withpost-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to befrom households with better-educated household heads,female-headed households, and households with higher youthdependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups aremuch less likely to migrate, other things equal. Usingmultinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broaddestination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh Cityor Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers ofmigration to those moving to other destinations. The authorsalso use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allowsus to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants, thosepresent in the household in 2010, but who have moved away by2012. This yields much tighter results. For education belowupper secondary school, the evidence on positive selectionby education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority‘penalty’ on spatial labor mobility remains strong andsignificant, even after controlling for specificcharacteristics of households and communes. This lack ofmobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctivepersistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minoritypopulations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished.
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