The Impact of Trade Liberalization on the Return to Education in Vietnam: Wage Versus Employment Effect

Several studies have identified the impact of trade liberalization in developing countries on the return to education within a Mincerian framework through a difference-in-difference estimator or with industry-level measures of trade openness. These studies have typically estimated the return to education in terms of changes in wages rather than employment, effectively ignoring the fact that trade liberalization affects not only wages but also employment opportunities. In this paper we use four large-scale representative household surveys from Vietnam for the period 1998-2006 to estimate the impact of trade liberalization on the return to education taking into account both changes in wages and employment. The results show that the impact was large in Vietnam but is severely underestimated if changes in employment opportunities are ignored.