Living Wage Report Rural Vietnam

This report estimated a living wage for rural areas of Vietnam, focusing on Soc Trang and Thai Binh and the seafood processing industry in Soc Trang, by using the new methodology developed by Anker and Anker (2017). This report has 4 sections.

Section I introduces the Anker methodology and how it is applied to estimate the living wage. Section II explores the food cost, housing cost, and non-food and non-housing cost needed to ensure decent living standards for a reference size family by using the national survey data and post checks based on new field research. At the end of this section, an estimate of living cost for a reference family is presented. Section III estimates the number of full-time workers in a reference family, the net living wage, compulsory deductions from pay and the gross wage a worker should be paid to ensure a living wage. The last section calculates the prevailing wages of shrimp-processing workers in Soc Trang and estimates the gaps between the living wage benchmarks and the prevailing wages.