Publication: Transforming Vietnamese Agriculture: Gaining More for Less
Loading...
Files in English
5,047 downloads
Date
2016-04
ISSN
Published
2016-04
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities, industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising labor costs are beginning to inhibit the sector’s ability to compete globally as a low cost producer of bulk undifferentiated commodities. Going forward, Vietnam’s agricultural sector needs to generate more from less. That is, it must generate more economic value - and farmer and consumer welfare - using less natural and human capital and less harmful intermediate inputs. The strategic shift was highlighted in the government’s agricultural restructuring plan (ARP), approved by the Prime Minister in June 2014. The ARP defines sector goals in terms of the triple bottom line of economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable development. It lays out expected changes in the roles and spending patterns of the government in the sector and discusses the need to work with other stakeholders, including in the private sector. It calls for an ambitious and ongoing process of learning and experimentation, and several potential directions are offered in this report.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank Group. 2016. Transforming Vietnamese Agriculture: Gaining More for Less. Vietnam Development Report;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24375 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Socioeconomic Impact of Mining on Local Communities in Africa(Washington, DC, 2015-06-25)For more than a decade, Africa has enjoyed a mineral boom. is the growth mostly happening in isolated places, sectors and periods? The approach adopted in this study is two-pronged. First, through case studies, including the results of fieldwork, mining’s impacts are examined in a country-specific context for each of three countries, Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania; and second, a statistical analysis is used to test whether the indicators of welfare improve with proximity to a mine.Publication System of Environmental-Economic Accounting 2012(New York: United Nations, 2014)Ecosystem accounting is a coherent and integrated approach to the assessment of the environment through the measurement of ecosystems, and measurement of the flows of services from ecosystems into economic and other human activity. The scale on which the accounting may be conducted varies: the ecosystems measured may range from specific land cover type areas, such as forests, to larger integrated areas, such as river basins, and may include areas considered to be relatively natural and those that are heavily affected by human activity, such as agricultural areas. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting 2012—Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting) constitutes an integrated statistical framework for organizing biophysical data, measuring ecosystem services, tracking changes in ecosystem assets and linking this information to economic and other human activity.Publication Madagascar(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08-25)This document is hence organized not around the three types of challenges, but around five themes of governance, public finance issues, private sector-led economy, poverty and environment, and human capital, all crucial to achieving faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth. Chapter one provides the country context. Chapter two discusses the quality of governance, an overarching issue in Madagascar. It has a direct bearing on the pace, the inclusiveness and sustainability of growth. While acknowledging the importance of improving governance for Madagascar, which is a difficult, medium term undertaking, this Systematic Country Diagnostic argues that progress is also possible. Chapter three discusses how amelioration in managing public finances, and increasing revenue in particular, could be used as a lens for improved governance. Chapter four discusses the role and challenges of the private sector, the main driver of growth. Chapter five discusses the challenges for achieving higher human capital in a country with a very young population and some of the highest infant stunting and malnourishment rates in the world. Chapter six discusses the faces of poverty, which are predominantly rural, agricultural and informal. A structural transformation has not started in Madagascar and poverty and environment are closely intertwined. The chapter also discusses the challenges to enhancing the management of natural resources and protecting the poor from natural disasters and impacts of climate change. Chapter seven summarizes the challenges and prioritizes the reforms.Publication Retaking the Path to Inclusion, Growth and Sustainability(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05-06)Bleak short-term economic outlook raises the risk that social and environmental achievements may not be sustained. The changed economic circumstances have exposed shortcomings in Brazil’s development model, epitomized by the struggle to achieve a sustainable fiscal policy. Against this background, some Brazilians are now asking whether the gains of the past decade might have been an illusion, created by the commodity boom, but unsustainable in today’s less forgiving international environment. Brazil thus finds itself at an important juncture and, to a certain extent, the policy course set today will determine whether the country can sustain the gains of the past and return to a path of solid, inclusive and environmentally sustainable growth. This Systematic Country Diagnostic offers a contribution to the debate about Brazil’s future development.Publication Colombia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06-22)Colombia has made impressive strides in reducing poverty and promoting shared prosperity during the last decade. Extreme poverty fell from 17.7 percent in 2002 to 8.1 percent in 2014, while total poverty (including moderate poverty) fell from 49.7 percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent in 2014. The decline implies that 6.2 million people left poverty in the period. The multidimensional poverty rate, which takes into account education, health, labor, childcare, and housing, has also experienced a remarkable decline from 49 percent in 2003 to 21.9 percent in 2014. The number of multidimensional poor declined by 9.8 million. Shared prosperity indicators followed a similar trend, especially after the second half of the decade. Between 2008 and 2013, the income per capita of the bottom 40 percent of Colombians grew at an average rate of 6.6 percent, significantly higher than the national average rate of 4.1 percent for the same period. Economic growth that led to job creation has been the main driver of poverty reduction and shared prosperity gains. The economy sustained an average GDP growth of 4.4 percent during the 2000s, almost 2 percentage points higher than the previous decade. For the period 2002-2013, economic growth explains 73 percent of the reduction in extreme poverty and 84 percent of the reduction in total poverty. Moreover, price stability, and in particular stable food prices contribute to poverty outcomes. As in the case of poverty reduction, labor income growth is the main determinant of shared prosperity in recent years in Colombia. Labor income represents at least fifty percent of income growth for the poorest 10 percent of the population, and up to 70 percent for those in the fourth decile, in the period 2008-2013. This evidence highlights the importance of high growth and low inflation for achieving the World Bank’s twin goals in Colombia.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.Publication Measuring Financial Inclusion : The Global Findex Database(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)This paper provides the first analysis of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution, though account penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of adults report having saved at a formal financial institution in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance institution in the past year. Although half of adults around the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them report barriers to account use that might be addressed by public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper documentation, though there are significant differences across regions and individual characteristics.