TRADITION AND CHANGE IN MARRIAGE PAYMENTS IN VIETNAM, 1963–2000

Abstract

This study analyses data from the Vietnam Study of Family Change to document trends and determinants of marriage payments in Vietnam from 1963 to 2000. We investigate the extent to which structural and policy transformations influenced the practice of payments, and estimate how societal changes indirectly impacted payments via their effects on population characteristics. Results indicate that marriage payments surged following market reform, but also reveal nuanced trends during earlier years. While the socialist attempts to eradicate brideprice appear to have been successful in the North before economic renovation, they were unsuccessful in the South. Structural and policy change explained most of the observed variations in payments. The changing characteristics of the married individuals mattered relatively less. We interpret the re-emergence of marriage payments as attesting to the resilience of traditional values and the unravelling of the socialist agenda, but also as a reflection of Vietnam's economic prosperity in the 1990s.

Keywords:

• marriage payments
• brideprice
• dowry
• Vietnam

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank Daniel Goodkind for his helpful comments on earlier drafts, and Vu Manh Loi and Vu Tuan Huy for their contribution during the earlier stages of this research. The Vietnam Study of Family Change that provides the data for the present analyses was supported by grants to the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, from the Fogarty International Center (2 D43 TW00657-06) and the National Institute on Aging (as a supplement to P30 AG012846, ‘Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging’).

Notes

1. The only previous study in Vietnam that provided data related to this issue was one by Goodkind (1996), based on surveys in three sites in one northern and one southern province.

2. Due to the sampling design, the distribution of respondents differs from the general population of Vietnam. For example, while almost three-quarters of the national population is rural, the study sample is half rural. In addition, very young married individuals were disproportionately excluded because the most recent marriage cohort omitted persons whose marital duration was below 3–4 years at the time of the survey. To minimise the inclusion of involuntarily childless couples, only married women who were under age 40 at the time of marriage and married men whose wife was younger than 40 at the time of marriage were included.

3. Besides recall errors, trends across cohorts could be affected by reverse truncation. Those marrying in the more distant past and surviving to the time of the survey tend to be younger at the time of marriage. This could modestly bias upwards the percentage reporting marital exchanges in the distant past, since marital exchanges were more common among younger couples. If so, it means that the striking upward trends in payments among recent marriage cohorts are actually understated in our data.