Vietnam: A widening poverty gap for ethnic minorities
- Author(s):
- Dang, Hai Anh
- Format:
- Book section
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press, 2012.
- Language:
- English
- Abstract:
- INTRODUCTION Vietnam is a tropical country with a land area of around 331,000 square kilometers in Southeast Asia, and is bordered by China to the north, Lao PDR to the northwest, and Cambodia to the southwest. The population of Vietnam was approximately 85 million in 2007, ranking it among the countries with the highest population densities in the world. Income per capita was estimated at US$1,052 in 2009; the value-added shares of GDP for agriculture, industry, and services in 2009 were 22 percent, 39 percent, and 39 percent, respectively (World Bank 2010.) Vietnam has fifty-four ethnic groups. Almost all these ethnic groups’ languages belong to the five language families of Southeast Asia and can be considered as sharing “the same historical and cultural horizon of the past which spread from south of the Yangtze River to the Islands of Southeast Asia” (Dang et al. 2000). Some of these groups have been in Vietnam since the earliest times (for example, the Viet and the Tay-Thai groups), while some arrived as recently as around the seventeenth to nineteenth century (for example, the Hanhi, the Lahu, and the Lolo groups) and some came to Vietnam throughout different periods, but mostly in the last millennium (for example, the Hoa, the Nung, and the Vankieu groups) (Dang et al., 2000). The Kinh or Viet (ethnic Vietnamese) is the largest group, accounting for 86 percent of the population. The next largest groups are the Tay, the Thai, the Muong, the Khmer (ethnic Cambodian), the Hoa (ethnic Chinese), and the Hmong, which together represent 10 percent of the population, and the remaining ethnic groups make up 4 percent of the population (GSO 2001a). © Cambridge University Press 2012.
- ISBN:
- 9781139105729 (ISBN); 9781107020573 (ISBN)
- Identifier:
- HmongStudies0647