Skilling Up Vietnam : Preparing the Workforce for a Modern Market Economy

Bodewig, Christian ; Badiani-Magnusson, Reena ; Macdonald, Kevin ; Newhouse, David ; Rutkowski, Jan

Washington, DC:World Bank

关键词: ECONOMIC GROWTH;    EXPANDING WORKFORCE;    LABOR MOBILITY;    PRODUCTIVITY;    REALLOCATION OF JOBS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/978-1-4648-0231-7
RP-ID  :  88895

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Education has played an important rolein making Vietnam a development success story over the last20 years. In the 1990s and early 2000s Vietnam experiencedrapid economic growth. The accelerated growth was drivenpredominantly by productivity increases that came in thewake of a rapid shift of employment from low-productivityagriculture to higher-productivity nonfarm jobs.Vietnam's economy began to industrialize and modernize.Poverty fell dramatically. And education played an enablingrole. Vietnam's committed effort to promote access toprimary education for all and to ensure its quality throughcentrally set minimum quality standards has contributed tothe country's reputation for having a young,well-educated workforce. Results from the 2012 Program forInternational Student Assessment (PISA) and new evidencefrom an adult skills survey presented in this book show thatliteracy and numeracy among Vietnam's youth and youngurban adult workforce are strong and exceed those of evensome wealthier countries. Despite its clear progress,Vietnam is facing new challenges. The pace of economicgrowth and the reallocation of jobs away from agriculturehave slowed in recent years. Rather than productivityimprovements, capital investments have become the mainsource of economic growth, but this model is not sustainablefor ensuring continued rapid economic growth. The size ofits workforce is still expanding, but its youth populationis shrinking, which means that Vietnam cannot continue torely on the size of its workforce for continued success.Instead, it needs to focus on making its workforce moreproductive and on alleviating skills barriers to labor mobility.