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Evidence has shown that parental smoking can cause health problems for children. It might be expected that parents who are aware of the harmful effects of second-hand smoke will reduce their smoking, especially as they have more children. However, based on instrumental variable regressions using data from the 2006 and 2008 Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys, we find a strongly positive and significant effect of the number of children on the probability of tobacco smoking in households in Vietnam. An additional child increases the probability of tobacco consumption in the household by approximately 15%. These findings imply low levels of awareness of the harmful effects of second-hand smoke on children’s health in Vietnam, and indicate the need for policy action to disseminate knowledge on the harmful effects of smoking.

The authors investigate determinants of individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with increasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility. Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) of 2012, the authors find that probability of migration is strongly associated with individual, household and community-level characteristics. The probability of migration is higher for young people and those with post-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to be from households with better-educated household heads, female-headed households, and households with higher youth dependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups are much less likely to migrate, other things equal. Using multinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broad destination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers of migration to those moving to other destinations. The authors also use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allows us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants, those present in the household in 2010, but who have moved away by 2012. This yields much tighter results. For education below upper secondary school, the evidence on positive selection by education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority ‘penalty’ on spatial labor mobility remains strong and significant, even after controlling for specific characteristics of households and communes. This lack of mobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctive persistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minority populations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished.

Empirical findings on the impacts of international remittances on poverty and inequality have not been consistent. This paper uses fixed-effect regression to estimate the impacts of foreign remittances on income and consumption of remittances-receiving households, and subsequently investigate the impacts of foreign remittances on poverty and inequality in Vietnam. It is found that receiving foreign remittances has increased household income and consumption remarkably, but decreased poverty slightly for the remittance recipients. In addition, foreign remittances have increased inequality, albeit at a small magnitude.

In the literature on program impact evaluation, the popular impact parameters can the average treatment effect, the average treatment effect on the treated, the average partial effect, and the average partial effect on the treated. In empirical studies, these parameters are not always presented and estimated clearly. In addition, when outcome functions are nonlinear, the estimation of these parameters is not straightforward. This paper discusses the estimation of these parameters in nonlinear models of outcomes and illustrates the estimation in an example of a micro-credit program in Vietnam.

This paper examines the effect of parental disability on school enrollment and educational performance for children in the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey. Results from instrumental-variables regressions indicate that children of parents with a disability have a lower enrollment rate in primary and secondary school of about 8 percentage points: 73 percent compared with 81 percent. However, the association of parental disability with educational performance is small and not statistically significant. The conclusion of the paper is that to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary school as well as increased coverage of secondary education, the government should have policies and programs that either directly support the education of children with disabled parents and/or have policies that support disabled adults, thus lessening the incentive for their children not to attend school.

This paper presents a semi-supervised learning method for Vietnamese part of speech tagging. We take into account two powerful tagging models including Conditional Random Fields (CRFs)and the Guided Online-Learning models (GLs) as base learning models. We then propose a semi-supervised learning tagging model for both CRFs and GLs methods. The main idea is to use of a word-cluster model as an associate source for enrich the feature space of discriminate learning models for both training and decoding processes. Experimental results on Vietnamese Tree-bank data (VTB) showed that the proposed method is effective. Our best model achieved accuracy of 94.10\% when tested on VTB, and 92.60\% an independent test.

The objective of the paper is to update the small area estimates of poverty and inequality for rural Vietnam. The new estimates of province and district level poverty for the year 2006, when combined with estimates available for 1999, allow for examination of how poverty has changed in rural Vietnam over the past seven years. The analysis finds that all provinces across the country experienced a noticeable reduction in rural poverty during the period 1999-2006. Some of the largest reductions in poverty are observed for provinces with poverty rates close to the national average. The poorest provinces have also experienced reductions in poverty, albeit at a more modest pace. Provinces and districts with lower levels of inequality in 2006 have seen above average poverty reductions. The authors consider both expenditure and income based measures of poverty and inequality, and find the results to be very similar.

The thermodynamic parameters (entropy and enthalpy change) and their increment per repeat unit have been determined in RP chromatography of PEG and its mono- and dimethyl ethers in different mobile phases. The different approaches for their determination and the problems related to the characteristic volumes (void volume, interstitial volume, pore volume) of the column are discussed. Very different dependences or the thermodynamic parameters were observed in aqueous mobile phases containing ACN, acetone, or methanol as organic modifier. In the first two mobile phases a linear dependence on the number of repeat units n is found, and the additional entropy and enthalpy changes per repeat unit are positive. In methanol-water, the enthalpy change is negative with a non-linear dependence on n, and the entropy change is independent on n and close to zero. The contribution of the end groups is almost the same in the first two mobile phases, but much smaller in methanol-water.