Relationship between household income and socio-political capital in rural Vietnam: a panel quantile regression approach

ABSTRACT

This study uses the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) data from 2008 to 2014 to analyse the relationship between socio-political capital and household income in rural Vietnam. We consider six types of socio-political capital (connections with others that create access to useful information and/or benefits) namely Communist Party membership, membership in mass organizations (MOs) and voluntary groups, connections with officials, financial assistance, and trust. Communist Party membership and financial assistance have significant positive effects on household income in the pooling, random, and fixed effects models and at all quantile levels. The effect of trust is also positive and significant in all models but only significant at high quantile levels. Whereas connections with officials show significantly positive effects in the pooling and random effects models and at most quantile levels, the effects of MOs and voluntary groups are negative and significant for some models.

KEYWORDS:

• Social capital
• political capital
• household income
• VARHS
• Vietnam
• panel quantile regression

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D73
• H7
• O12
• O53
• P16

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We considered $\lambda$ from 0.1 to 0.9 and found that this set of $\lambda$ did not affect the precision of the $\beta$ estimates.

² The survey was conducted every 2 years from 2006 to 2014 across 12 provinces in Vietnam. Because several questions changed between 2006 and 2008, we use the data from 2008 to 2014 in terms of continuity. The objective and structure of the data set are fully explained on data web-page (https://www.wider.unu.edu/database/viet-nam-data).

³ To save space, we only report the estimated results of the socio-political capital variables. The plots of the estimated quantile models’ results are available in the on-line version of the supplementary materials.