Socioeconomic determinants of income loss during COVID-19 in a mountainous area in Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Identifying vulnerable socioeconomic groups enables policymakers to design relevant intervention strategies and garner the support necessary to implement them. Previous studies indicate that COVID-19 contributed to widening socioeconomic inequalities, but a gap remains in understanding the impacts of the pandemic on ethnic groups in mountainous areas in Vietnam. We conducted interviews and applied logistic regression methods to analyse the relationships between socioeconomic factors and the likelihood of losing income due to the pandemic. We found that Indigenous people, communes, jobholders with more physical contact at work, groups that include more boys, and smaller residential landholders were more likely to suffer from COVID-19-related income loss. The findings of this study enable the Vietnamese Government and practitioners to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 on households in mountainous areas. This study may guide the government toward developing policies for reducing the impact of similar pandemics on those groups in mountainous locations.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigeneity
• rural livelihoods
• COVID-19

Sustainable Development Goals:

• SDG 10: Reduced inequalities

Acknowledgement

We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Aus4Skills program from the Australian Government for their generous support to conduct this work under grant no. AAGF-R4-00060. We would like to send our gratitude to the interviewers, park managers, local officers, and local people for their support and participation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Aus4Skills [Grant number AAGF-R4-00042].