General Statistics Office of Vietnam advice
Sebastian Rumsby 210972 at alumni.soas.ac.uk
Thu Oct 22 09:50:35 PDT 2015
Hi all,
I'm just starting a PhD at Warwick University about how religious change is
impacting economic/social/political activity in the Vietnamese highlands,
probably focusing on the Hmong. I haven't yet pinned down my ideas yet, but
I would like to contact the General Statistics Office (Tổng Cục Thống Kê) in
Hanoi and request access to census data across several years, in far more
detail than their website <https://www.gso.gov.vn/Default_en.aspx?tabid=491>
provides. I'm based in the UK but plan to go to Vietnam next year to
collect data, among other things.
Has anyone worked with the General Statistics Office before? Does anyone
know someone who works there? Is there a formal information request
procedure which I'll need to follow? Would that also require an official
research visa?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Seb Rumsby
University of Warwick
http://warwick.academia.edu/SebRumsby
Linh Vu vhlinh16 at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 22 20:32:59 PDT 2015
Dear SebastianFor Census data, the focal person in the GSO is Ms. Nguyen Thi Xuan Mai, email: ntxmai at gso.gov.vn. She's the Director of Department of Population and Labor Statistics which is responsible for the Census data collection.
Best regardsLinh
Tim Gorman tmg56 at cornell.edu
Fri Oct 23 10:44:39 PDT 2015
Hi Seb,
Keep in mind that you'll probably be asked to pay for any data from the
GSO, and the prices charged for raw data (for foreign researchers at least)
can run pretty high. Before you buy anything, check out the Univ of
Minnesota's IPUMS data depository. They make microdata from the 1989, 1999,
and 2009 population and housing census freely available to academic
researchers. The website is:
https://international.ipums.org/international-action/sample_details/country/vn
.
The Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey is also a good resource (much
more in depth, but with a much smaller sample size). I've been able to
download that data freely from a Vietnamese website for development
economists, and I could be able to point you in the right direction.
The Vietnam Access to Resources Household survey is another good bet - it
only covers a handful of provinces, but a few of those are in the
northwest. More info here:
or contact Finn Tarp at the Univ of Copenhagen.
Beyond that, the Agricultural and Fisheries Census might be very useful as
well, but you'll have to buy the data from the GSO, and it won't be cheap.
Contact me off list if you'd like the survey questionnaires for those. I
think they were administered in 2001, 2006, and 2011.
Hope that's helpful.
Tim
----
Timothy Gorman
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University
Email: tmg56 at cornell.edu
US Tel: (+1) 607-216-9845
VN Tel: (+84) 125-318-8570
Dan Tsang dtsang at uci.edu
Fri Oct 23 11:00:48 PDT 2015
Seb, see also the Asia: Vietnam data section of the UCI social science data subject guide under Data Sources:
http://guides.lib.uci.edu/c.php?g=333031&p=2250760
dan
Dan Tsang dtsang at uci.edu
Fri Oct 23 12:37:56 PDT 2015
Here’s my reflections back in 2004 on a quest for social science data in Vietnam:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tc6f98m
Reflections on a Quest for Social Science Data in Vietnam
Journal Issue:
IASSIST Quarterly, 28(1)
Author:
Tsang, Daniel C, UC Irvine
Publication Date:
Spring , 2004
dan
Patrick Gubry patgub at hotmail.com
Fri Oct 23 15:08:40 PDT 2015
Dear
Sebastian,
I agree with Tim about the usefulness of IPUMS data bases of the Vietnamese
censuses which should answer most of your needs.
Personally, I have been occasionally working with the GSO, but it was a long
time ago, thus my experience may not be still accurate.
As I experienced:
- It is easy to get raw census data from GSO (microdata from the census); but these
data have to be paid and there is no fixed price.
- I guess you need data at a lower geographical level than those which have
been published and/or data concerning specific variables; in the first case,
you need to also get the map of the enumeration areas (units which have been
given to the interviewers, one to each); in both cases you need to get the list
of the variables in the file.
- Fortunately, concerning your research topic, ethnicity and religion have been asked in the Vietnamese censuses, contrary to many other countries.
Censuses are implemented every 10 years.
- The people with whom I worked are now retired and I don’t know someone
anymore.
- I don’t know any "formal information request procedure", but you should
identify the head of the processing of the last census of 2009 and previously
write to him/her to ask how to get the information you need, before requesting
an appointment.
- I think you don’t need an official research visa (visa for work) at this
step, but an attestation/mission order from your university should be useful,
if not compulsory.
Concerning the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS), one has to
keep in mind that:
(1) Taking into account the limited size of the sample, VHLSS is significant
for the whole country but may not enable to make significant analyses about a
specific population (like the Hmong) or any smaller geographic area.
(2) The sampling base of VHLSS has been established from the census. VHLSS aims
at completing the census data which don’t enable to study living standards as
the census provides no data on income and expenses. However, VHLSS has probably
a strong bias concerning precisely the study of poverty, as the poorest people,
and those working the most informally, notably the “floating population”, are absent
from the census… Several studies have been precisely done on this issue (e.g. Pincus
& Sender, 2008; Dinh Vu Trang Ngan
& Pincus, 2011; Gubry, 2014).
I hope this information may be helpful to you.
Patrick.
Patrick Gubry
UMR "Développement et sociétés", Université Paris 1
Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)
32, avenue Henri Varagnat
93143 Bondy Cedex (France)
Tél. : 00 33 (0)1 48 02 59 96
Fax : 00 33 (0)1 48 47 30 88
Courriel : patrick.gubry at ird.fr
Internet : www.ird.fr
http://umr-developpement-societes.univ-paris1.fr
www.researchgate.net/profile/Patrick_Gubry