Vietnam labour policies and its impact on rural wages: an experience from hired farm labourers in the Red River Delta

Purpose. The purpose of this article is to understand how Vietnamese policies for labour impacting on wage of rural labourers in agricultural sector. To do that, the paper particularly pays attention on analyzing wage of hired farm labourers in the Red River Delta region, the rice basket of Vietnam. Methodology / approach. Analyzing the above-mentioned impact of Vietnamese policies was performed by using data surveyed from 150 hired farm labourers in the Red River Delta of Vietnam. The survey on wages of rural labourers was conducted in Bac Ninh, Thai Binh and Hai Duong which are the three typical agricultural production areas in the Red River Delta in 2019. In this survey, the author interviewed 150 people who work as hired labourers in rice cultivation in Bac Ninh, clam farming in Thai Binh and pig raising in Hai Duong. The sample was randomly drawn among farm households which hire labourers in these provinces. This sample was divided into 2 groups of female and male labourers. The main purposes of this survey were to gather both qualitative and quantitative data on hired labourers including: age, gender, education level, money wage, wage in kind and other remunerations that they received from employers. Information relating to their participation in social insurance and vocational training were also collected like: number of years involving in social insurance; money that they used to purchase social insurance; frequency and time spending in vocational training courses. The personal interviews using a standard questionnaire with open and close questions were implemented separately with male and female hired farm labourers. They were interviewed in different places to ensure that their responses do not affect others. After checking for missing values, the author used the following methods: frequency distribution with mean and standard deviation for a description of respondents; cross tabulation and T-test were also used to test for differences in proportions and significant difference between groups; a linear regression model was applied to examine impact of wage regulation, social insurance and vocational training policies on wage of hired labourers in agricultural production (dependent variable was average money wage per month, it was estimated by sum of money wage and other remunerations that a labourer gets each month; independent variables were age, gender, education level and dummy variables which represented labourers’ participation in mentioned l