The determinants of internal migration in Vietnam: Could 'Broad Lessons' from empirical literature be learned?

Migration, especially from rural to urban, is one of important factor in social development. This paper examines 7 hypotheses on potential impact of age, human capital, economic earning, economic security, amenities, geographic distance and social capital on migration discussed in Schaffner (2014) for the case of Vietnam. These hypotheses were re-organized to construct a an uniform conceptual framework of determinants of migration decision making. Using various data-sets from many different survey together with empirical results from economic literature, we test these hypothesis one after the other. Our results reveals that (1) young age is a characteristics of migrants but (2) high stock of human capital is not; (3) higher earnings and (4) risk-sharing mechanism are motivations of migration, but (5) amenities is not. (6) Distance does not impact migration decision and (7) social capital’ impact is ambiguous. If any, it comes from the network at destination location.