Gender and urban - rural pay gap in Mekong Delta

Abstract

This study analyzes the wage differential of male and female workers, and labor in urban and rural areas in the Mekong Delta provinces using the VHLSS 2014 data. The results of the decomposition of the wage disparity between men and women show unexplained difference has the major contribution in the wage gap between men and women, in particular the differences in the returns to academic and professional degrees for male and female workers. Meanwhile, the explained difference has lower explanatory power, suggesting that most of attributes of male and female labor do not significantly differ. The results of the decomposition of urban-rural wage differential show the opposite: the difference is mainly due to the fact that urban workers are more educated than rural labor, while the unexplained difference has lower explanatory power. Based on these results, the paper proposes a number of recommendations to reduce the income gap in the Mekong Delta.