Impact of land-acquisition induced resettlement policy on the ethnic household income in mountainous Vietnam

Abstract

Land acquisition and resettlement issues related to hydropower and irrigation works have always been one of the hot issues in Vietnam mountainous areas for many years. Although the Government has introduced many policies to ensure the rights of resettled people, as well as protect their lives, the effectiveness of these policies seems to be still insignificant, because many resettled people still face many difficulties in their daily life, especially income. The research is conducted within the project titled “The urgent issues in resettlement implementation for the ethnic minorities in Vietnam mountainous areas” and funded by National Council for Science and Technology Policy in 2016-2020 (CTDT/16-20) under Committee for Ethnic Minority Affairs. Applying Likert-scale and Propensity Score Matching (PSM), this study shows that 34% of the resettled households have a lower income, specifically estimated to be 8.0 - 13.1 million VND/household/year or 1.7 - 3.0 million VND/person/year lower than the income of the controlled group. However, agricultural income is not significantly different between resettled households and controlled households. This article only focuses on clarifying the impact of the resettlement policy on the general income and agricultural income of ethnic minority households; while methods to create jobs, increase income, and reduce poverty sustainably for ethnic minority households in the resettlement sites should be conducted in another research in the future.