World Bank Releases Vietnam’s Poverty Map

The World Bank has released a map indicating poverty data in Vietnam, zoning poor regions based on indicators of income rate, employment, school attendance, nutrition, and sanitation. The data loaded on the new MapVietnam website at www.worldbank.org/mapvietnam/ which provides access to socioeconomic data at the province and district level in both English and Vietnamese, said Gabriel Demombynes. The site is expected to be a resource for journalists, policymakers, researchers, and citizens looking for information on social and economic situations at a local level as the map illustrates Vietnam’s wide diversity, which can be found in other statistics, Mr. Demombynes said. The map, which is drawn from Vietnam’s 2009 National Population and Housing Census, the most recent source of data at the district level for most indicators, show that the northwest is the poorest region with between 64% and 76% of population living in poor conditions, followed by the northeast region and the Central Highlands. Vietnam has around 5.2 million poor people, or 5.7% of the country’s total population, weakening its competitiveness and slowing the economic growth as the country needs to pay a large amount of money for poverty reduction. As an effort to improve the situation, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said that the country needs to make efforts to maintain sustainable poverty reduction, considering it a way to promote the development. The country has borrowed billions of dollars from foreign countries to implement its poverty reduction programs but the situation has little improvement due to cumbersome administration and corruption. (worldbank.org Mar 9)