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This study revisits returns to education in three Vietnamese rural provinces, using data on seven waves between 2007 and 2017, taken from the Thailand Vietnam SocioEconomic Panel (TVSEP). We deploy various approaches to address the endogeneity problem, and the findings show that individuals with a lower secondary school diploma are likely to earn a higher wage income. The present research also provides evidence of heterogeneity in the rate of return in terms of sex and ethnicity. In particular, men need a lower secondary school diploma, while women require an upper secondary school diploma to improve their wage income. Similarly, the relationship between a lower secondary school diploma and wage income is found among the majority of the Kinh people, but ethnic minorities do not enjoy this benefit. Overall, the benefits of education are crucial among the labor force, especially for vulnerable groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, who would benefit from the support of policymakers.

Understanding the health benefits of education is vital in setting policy priorities, especially in lower-income countries. Using the instrumental variable with panel data estimation approach, this study utilizes data from the Thailand Vietnam Socio Economic Panel to provide comparative evidence of the health benefits of education in two countries. The findings indicate that highly educated people are likely to report better current health status, reduced probability of having serious diseases in both countries, increased body mass index (BMI) in Vietnam and decreased BMI in Thailand. Additionally, the benefits of education on health are significant among Vietnamese men, Thai women, and Vietnamese ethnic minorities. The results also suggest that the positive effect of education on health can be explained by higher household income. Thus, promoting education among vulnerable groups, including women and ethnic minorities, should be particularly prioritized to mitigate the gaps in health inequities.

This study intends to estimate the rate of returns to education in Vietnam, the distributive effects of education on wages, and the wage penalty from the incidence of overeducation in the Vietnamese labor market during 2004–2016. This study employs a pseudo‐panel approach to address omitted variables bias and the unconditional quantile regression to identify the heterogeneity of returns to education across the income distribution. Our main finding indicates that the estimated rate of returns to education in Vietnam is approximately 6.5%, showing a downward bias from previous estimates. The returns vary across wage distributions, where a lower rate of return is observed in lower quantiles and a higher rate among those individuals at the higher quantiles. The returns to education have declined since 2008, confirming the oversupply of highly educated workers in the Vietnamese labor market with an estimated wage penalty of 17%. Government assistance measures are needed to reduce the overeducation and the wage penalty issues in the Vietnamese labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]