Implications of economic reform and spatial mobility for fertility in vietnam

To understand how this spectacular fertility decline occurred in such apoor country, it is necessary to examine the goals of the following threeprograms: 1 the two-child policy, 2 the po

© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers Printed in the Netherlands.

Implications of economic reform and spatial mobility

for fertility in Vietnam

MICHAEL J WHITE1, YANYI K DJAMBA2& DANG NGUYEN ANH3

1Brown University, USA;2Southeastern Louisiana University, USA;3Institute of Sociology, Vietnam

Abstract. Vietnam has registered a dramatic decline in fertility during the last decades While the causes of such a sustained decline are still not well documented, many observers believe that government policies adopted in the 1980s have contributed to lower fertility This article

focuses on the implications of the Doi Moi program of market reforms on fertility, taking into

account the influences of migration and population policy The analysis is based on a tial logit model of birth histories of ever married women interviewed in Vietnam in 1997 The

sequen-results show a substantial decline in fertility since the Doi Moi program was introduced The

disruptive effects of migration are less pronounced, although migrants generally exhibit lower childbearing rates, and a somewhat different pattern of parity progression We argue that the economic reforms of 1986, and the two-child policy initiated two years later, have reinforced Vietnamese women’s desire for smaller families.

Keywords:Economic reform, Fertility, Migration, Vietnam

Introduction

The population of Vietnam, which was about 13 million at the beginning ofthe century, attained 27 million in 1955 (Barbieri et al 1995) and 76.7 million

in 1997 (NCPFP 1998) This rapid population growth and the war conditions

of the past generated substantial regional differences in population tion After the Vietnam War, the government adopted a series of measuresboth to control fertility and to redistribute the actual population These meas-

distribu-ures overlapped with the Doi Moi program, which transformed the country

from a centrally planned system to a market-driven economy Although theseprograms were not associated with substantial economic growth, fertility hasdramatically declined from 5.6 children per woman in 1979 (Haughton 1997)

to about 2.3 in 1997 (GSO 1999)

To understand how this spectacular fertility decline occurred in such apoor country, it is necessary to examine the goals of the following threeprograms: (1) the two-child policy, (2) the population redistribution program,

and (3) the Doi Moi economic reform plan After several years of encouraging

family planning, the Vietnamese government officially adopted a hensive population policy in 1988 (Goodkind 1995) This policy stipulatedthat couples should have a maximum of two children, with three to five yearsspacing between births (Hoa et al 1996) To reinforce this policy, penaltieswould be imposed upon violators, including modest fines and possible loss ofjobs for government employees (Goodkind 1995).

compre-In practice, however, the two-child policy was not implemented in thesame way across the country In fact, many researchers have noted a discrep-ancy between proximate determinants of reproductive behavior and actualfertility (Allman et al 1991: 312; GSO 1995; Goodkind 1994) Haughton(1997), for example, argues that the proximate determinants of low fertility,including contraception and abortion, would imply a value close to two chil-dren per woman in early 1990s The gap, he notes, is probably due to the factthat people overstate the degree to which they use contraception (Haughton1997: 208) In addition to possible measurement errors, this demographicpuzzle suggests that the causes of sustained decline in fertility observed inVietnam might also be associated with other factors, such as economic reformand migration, which can affect the proximate determinants of fertility.Besides the two-child policy, the government also initiated a populationredistribution program in 1980s This was the first major population policyinitiated since the North–South unification in mid-1970s This program wasdesigned to counter the great disparities between manpower and naturalresources, focusing on rural-rural and urban-rural migration rather than en-couraging rural-urban migration (Dang et al 1997: 319) Such a relocationprogram has changed the composition of both urban and rural populations,but its effect on fertility remains unknown

The third important program that may have influenced the reproductive

behavior of the Vietnamese population is the Doi Moi policy Officially

ad-opted in December 1986, this program opened the doors to the free marketeconomy and the non-socialist business world; new forms of ownership wereintroduced with the creation of private sectors and markets Yet, like thepopulation distribution program, the effects of economic change on fertility

in Vietnam remain unclear Moreover, the fact that all these three programsoverlap in time and space makes the analysis of their individual effects onfertility difficult

The purpose of this research is to examine the interrelations betweenmigration, economic transition, and reproductive behavior in Vietnam Themajor question is whether the economic reform and the population redistri-bution programs initiated in the 1980s have contributed to further decline infertility Previous studies on the implications of the economic reform on fer-tility in Vietnam have produced contradictory results Some scholars argued

Figure 1. Total fertility and gross domestic product.

that children would be more wanted under the decollectivization period, asparents needed more labor for their newly acquired family farms (Allman

et al 1991: 308) Yet, the analysis of fertility trends in Vietnam reveals acontinuous decline, making this latter mechanism less plausible

Conversely, the introduction of private entrepreneurship is said to lead tolower fertility, as parents struggle to devote their resources to business forupward mobility (Bryant 1998) This is because, under the new economicregime, the economic returns from children may be negative or, at least,less substantial than in the planned economy Parents must now cope withrising costs of education and other expenses, if they want to guarantee thesocial mobility of their children This strategy of grooming children for goodjobs started among the rich and urban residents (Bryant 1998: 262), but itexpanded to other groups across the society This assumption is in line withdata in Figure 1 (Data are in Table A1.)

The examination of the relationship between fertility trends and economicdata, as measured by average annual growth rates of real Gross DomesticProduct (GDP), suggests that the economic reform of 1986 may have con-tributed to lower fertility Although these data are based on gross estimations

of fertility from various censuses and different surveys (Haughton 1997),

they do reveal a substantial decline since the introduction of Doi Moi Also

according to these data, Vietnam has registered a significant improvement in

the growth of the real GDP from 1989, suggesting that the Doi Moi program

has produced positive results (Harvie & Hoa 1997: 175) The fluctuationsobserved in 1991-1992 were mostly due to temporary decline in industrial

production The relationship between economic reform and fertility will beexamined in more detail in this study by comparing childbearing behavior

before and after the initiation of the Doi Moi program.

The influence of migration on fertility has been documented in severalstudies under the disruption hypothesis model (Ram & George 1990; Beaujot1991; Ford 1990; Goldstein & Goldstein 1981) The conclusion emergingfrom most of these studies is that the fertility of migrant women will be lower

at the time of arrival, higher shortly after arrival and will then converge tothat of the resident women (Ng & Nault 1997) We examine the way in whichmigration alters the childbearing pattern of women The analysis is based ondata from the Vietnam Migration and Health Survey conducted in 1997

Recent forms of migration and their contexts

Over the past three decades the government has organized the relocation ofpopulation to new areas, called New Economic Zones, to achieve a morerational distribution of labor and population among various regions Duringthe period between 1975 and 1995, a total of 4.7 million people were officiallyrelocated (Do 1998) Most of these migrants moved from Red River Delta andNorthern Central regions, and went to the Central Highlands and Southeastareas where more arable land and development programs were available Thegoal of this resettlement program was to improve the standard of living of thepopulation, but it was also used to move political opponents to remote areas

In some New Economic Zones, as many as half of the migrants have beenreported to have moved again or returned to their place of origin soon afterthey arrived (Desbarats 1987; Dang 1997)

Parallel to this planned program of resettlement, a spontaneous migrationmovement also took place in the 1990s These migrants were not under gov-ernment control; they relocated on their own Spontaneous migration is oftenselective of more economically motivated individuals The Central Highlandsand Southeast regions, known for their rich natural environments and largeamounts of arable land, attracted many of these spontaneous migrants TheMinistry of Agriculture and Rural Development claimed that spontaneous orunregistered migration has risen in recent years to include 212,000 house-holds comprising more than one million people Of these figures, 97,000households migrated to Southeastern provinces, more than 70,000 householdsmoved to Central Highland provinces, and 37,000 households migrated tosouthern provinces (Do 1998)

Another major redistribution in Vietnam is from rural to urban areas Thismovement is usually explained by economic factors Urban bias and generalperceptions may also suggest that life would be better in cities than in rural

areas Sayings such as “It is better to be poor in the city than rich in the

countryside” (Giau nha que khong bang ngoi le thanh pho), illustrate the

perceived advantage of urban residents over their rural counterparts in etnam today (Dang 1998) Moreover, income inequality between rural and

Vi-urban areas and the freedom of movement since the initiation of the Doi

Moi policy increased rural-urban migration Such movements were mostlytemporary, with migrants working in the tertiary sector and in low-paid jobsoften rejected by native workers (e.g., bricklayer, porters, weavers, vendors,cyclo drivers, etc.)

Out-migration from rural areas seems beneficial to the migrants, theirfamilies, and their rural communities in several ways It relieves populationpressure on limited land areas Many migrants send remittances to their fam-ilies, augmenting rural well-being In addition, temporary migrant labor fromrural provinces has become an important resource required for meeting theincreasing demand for labor in both manufacturing and non-manufacturingindustries We now investigate how these different forms of spatial mobility– urban and rural, temporary and permanent - affect fertility

Data and methods

The Vietnam Migration and Health Survey (VNMHS97) was conducted in

1997 by the Institute of Sociology of the National Center for Social Sciencesand Humanities of Vietnam, under an international cooperation project on mi-gration research and training funded by the United Nations Population Fund(UNFPA) The Vietnam survey is part of a four-country study designed anddirected by the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University(USA)

The main purpose of the survey was to examine the interrelations between

the Doi Moi program, the migration process initiated through the population

redistribution policy of the 1980s, women’s status, and reproductive behavior.Six provinces were covered by the survey, taking into account the differentials

in geographical and rural/urban sectors in the country A purposive samplingmethod was applied to randomly selected areas in order to obtain an adequatenumber of respondents in each of the following three migrant categories:non-migrants, permanent migrants, and temporary migrants As a result, ourfindings cannot provide estimates of the relative numbers of each kind ofmigrant, nor can we aggregate the three categories Our focus, therefore, is

on the comparative differentials in characteristics and reproductive behavioramong the groups

A total of 2502 individuals were interviewed in 1847 households, 1265women and 1237 men Of the 1265 women, 1015 were ever married and 250

never married Our analysis is limited to ever married women of differentmigration statuses Migration is difficult to define Its definition depends onthe research questions and the analytical strategies involved For example,some scholars may emphasize the time dimension (duration) of the move,while others consider the crossing of geographic borders as a major element

in defining migration The definitions used here derive from intensive sions between Brown University researchers and their colleagues in Vietnam.These definitions have also been used in other work published on the sameVietnamese data (Djamba et al 1999)

discus-The three migrant categories are defined as follows: (1) Non-migrantswere persons who were born and registered in the place of interview andwho were never away for more than 6 months since age 13; (2) Permanentmigrants had been (a) born elsewhere, but registered at place of interview, or(b) born in place of current residence and registered there, but away from thatplace for at least six months since age 13; (3) Temporary migrants were bornother than in place of interview and held permanent registration elsewhere

In Vietnam, a large percentage of permanent migrants in rural areas were infact return migrants – persons who had been either mobilized into the army

or displaced during the many years of war

Three different instruments were used to collect information on individualrespondents, household members, and community data Although most vari-ables used here are available in the individual respondents’ file, a few othersare found only in the household file To get a working file for our fertilityanalysis, we combined the two data sets by matching the respondent’s in-formation using two key identification variables (province and code) available

in both files Among the 1015 ever married women interviewed, some havemissing data on age at first marriage (16 cases) and migration status (4 cases)

So in terms of migration status, there are 1011 valid cases distributed as low: 488 non-migrants, 361 permanent migrants, and 162 temporary migrants(see Table 1) But our working file includes all the 1015 ever married women.Our analysis focuses on the impact of economic reform and spatial mo-bility on the birth history of women with different migration statuses, which

fol-we analyze using an event history approach The individual questionnairecontains information on each of the first five moves (and last move, for thosewith more than five moves), type of place of residence or destination of eachmove (rural, town, city), and the waiting time, or each year of exposure tochildbearing From the migration history, we constructed a dummy variable– called move – which takes the value of 1 for each year for which a personmoved, and 0 otherwise

Note that the move variable differs in many ways from the migrationstatus variable, which divides respondents into the three categories defined

earlier The move variable records every trip of one month or more madeafter age 13, regardless of registration status In contrast, migration status

is cross-sectional information, reflecting the respondent’s current residenceand registration status According to these definitions, even non-migrants canhave valid data on the move variable, if they made some short duration moves

So, move, place of residence in the interval, and birth are time-varying ables, because their values may vary over the event history We also includedattributes that are constant over time, such as education, place of birth, andage at marriage

vari-Another major variable used in this study is policy period This variableserves as a proxy for the economic reform Dang (1999) has identified the

following important features of the Doi Moi periods The first period (1987–

1991) was characterized by the diversification of market opportunities andthe emergence of the private sector and new forms of ownership During thesecond period (1992–1997), policy measures were taken to strengthen theachievements of the economic reform and explicitly promote foreign invest-ments The second period also observed a substantially increased movement

of rural labor to the major cities and urban centers (Dang, 1999) However,

because the two-child policy was introduced only two years after the Doi Moi

program, the policy period variable also measures the effect of the populationcontrol program of 1988

Following the approach used in previous work in China (Goldstein et al.1997), and the usual practice in the analysis of life history data (Allison, 1984;Blossfeld et al 1989: 22–25), we constructed a person year data file describedbelow Each woman contributed one record for each year from age 15 onwarduntil age at survey, or age 44, whichever is smaller We analyze these data inthe form of sequential logit (discrete time) models predicting the likelihood ofhaving a first birth since marriage, having a second birth since first birth, andhaving a higher-order birth since second birth Covariates available in eachrecord include age of the woman in each person-year, a censoring indicator (1

if yes, 0 otherwise), age of the woman at marriage, parity of the woman, place

of residence, mobility status during the year (the move variable), duration

of exposure to childbearing (waiting time), and policy period The resultingevent history data file constructed from the 1015 respondents has a total of23,211 records

Results

Before discussing the results of multivariate analysis, it is important to notesome differentials observed in the original sample of ever married women.The descriptive statistics in Table 1 show that although most respondents were

Table 1. Characteristics of sample: ever married women, Vietnam 1997

women migrants migrants migrants

Standard deviations in parentheses Total number of women shown above (1011) excludes 4 respondents with unknown migration status The actual sample contains 1015 ever married women.

born in rural areas, many have moved to urban areas Though women may bemoving primarily for family related reasons, the concentration of migrants

in cities suggests that many migrant women and their families are attracted

by various modern opportunities available in urban places This urban pull ispartly sustained by urban bias, a practice in which governments and privateinvestors tend to favor cities by providing them with better socioeconomicand technological services (Keyfitz 1982; Lipton 1976)

There are no significant differences in number of children ever born bymigration status Likewise, migration status does not seem to affect the pro-cess of union formation; the differences in age at marriage by migration statusare overall small Apart from number of moves, most variables listed in Table

1 do not change much across migration categories This weak associationmay reflect the cross-sectional, summary nature of these data The dynamicinformation contained in event history models may reveal other differences It

is noteworthy, though, that temporary migrants are younger and intermediate

in educational attainment We have evidently captured some persons in themiddle of an adjustment process Once enough time passes, many people whoare now temporary migrants will register and then be classified as permanentmigrants

Table 2 presents selected statistics by age and migration groups ing within age groups and across migration status, there is some suggestionthat migrants are a little later to marry and carry through their first andsecond birth (We do not make comparisons across age due to the variations

Compar-in the family-buildCompar-ing processes) Overall, the effects of migration status aremodest

Table 2. Median age at marriage and childbearing; ever married

Viet-namese women, 1997

Median age Marriage 1st birth 2nd birth 3rd birth

How do these traits manifest themselves in the birth history? We now turn

to event history analysis predicting the likelihood of having a birth of a givenorder, as a function of policy period, spatial mobility, and other selected vari-ables Since economic reform and population policy were introduced duringthe same period, distinguishing their effects on fertility is a daunting taskthat goes beyond the scope of this paper Because most Vietnamese want tohave two children (Goodkind 1995: 98–99), we suggest that the populationpolicy effects will be seen mostly in the higher-order births Economic policyeffects, if any, would be more likely to emerge through covariates linked topopulation redistribution

First marriage to first birth

Table 3 contains the results of logit regression models predicting the lihood of having a first birth since marriage, for each migration status asdefined at the time of the survey The data in Table 3 show that the effects

like-of the explanatory variables on the transition to childbearing differ across thethree migrant status categories So, while no significant policy period effectswere found in the logit regression model predicting the transition to childbear-ing for permanent migrants, the likelihood of having a first birth increasedsignificantly for temporary migrants during the five years following the intro-duction of the economic reform program and decreased thereafter The effect

of policy period is more pronounced for non-migrants for whom the ponding regression coefficients are positively and statistically significant for

corres-all the post-Doi Moi periods.

The effect of the disruption hypothesis on first birth is captured by the

‘move in interval’ dummy variable For all three groups of women, thedirection of the effect is negative but not significant Such findings do not sup-port the idea that spatial mobility reduces childbearing in Vietnam.1That is,migration does not account for most of fertility decline observed in Vietnam.2

Age is understandably an important predictor of first birth The likelihood

of having a first birth since marriage increases with age, but the relationship

is not linear The turning point depends on migration status and other factors.From the Table 3 coefficients, we estimate that the probability of having afirst birth since marriage would start to decline from around age of 29, 32, and

31 years, respectively for non-migrants, permanent migrants, and temporarymigrants These calculations show the appreciable age displacement in thechildbearing profile of migrants Age at marriage also affects the timing ofchildbearing The relationship is negative and significant for non-migrants,permanent migrants, and temporary migrants The negative association sug-gests that those who married at younger ages had their first child sooner aftermarriage than their counterparts who married at older ages

Other variables are also associated with first birth Educational attainmenthas significant effects on childbearing only for non-migrants, whereas urbanresidence significantly increases the likelihood of first birth for non-migrants,permanent migrants, and temporary migrants Nativity does influence child-bearing, but in an inconsistent manner Among non-migrants only thoseborn in a city had a significant reduction in the risk of first birth, while fortemporary migrants only town born respondents had significantly lower risk.When all the above factors are controlled, differences in the timing offirst birth become visible The regression coefficients for waiting time show amore pronounced duration pattern for permanent migrants Among temporarymigrants, the likelihood of first birth is highest during the second year after

Table 3. Likelihood of having a first birth since marriage, controlling for policy period, migration, and selected background variables: Vietnamese women, 1997

Variable Non-migrants Permanent migrants Temporary migrants

Age at beginning of interval 2.009 ∗∗∗ 0.324 1.718 ∗∗∗ 0.258 1.676 ∗∗∗ 0.356 Age square −0.035∗∗∗ 0.006 −0.027∗∗∗ 0.005 −0.027∗∗∗ 0.007 Age at first marriage −0.174∗∗∗ 0.045 −0.276∗∗∗ 0.06 −0.107 0.045 Policy period

First birth to second birth

As in Table 3, the models of birth history in Table 4 reveal that the transitionfrom first birth to second birth is not significantly affected by spatial mobility