Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/236346 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14315
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Despite being the poorest or second poorest participant, Vietnam performed much better than all other developing countries, and even ahead of wealthier countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., on the 2012 and 2015 PISA assessments. We provide a rigorous investigation of Vietnam's strong performance. After making various parametric and non-parametric corrections for potentially non-representative PISA samples, including bias due to Vietnam's large out-of-school population, Vietnam still remains a large positive outlier conditional on its income. Possible higher motivation of, and coaching given to, Vietnamese students only partly explains Vietnam's performance, and this is also the case for various observed household- and school-level variables. Finally, Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions indicate that the gap in average test scores between Vietnam and the other participating countries is due not to differences in students' and schools' observed characteristics, but instead to Vietnam's greater "productivity" of those characteristics.
Subjects: 
education
student learning
test scores
enrollment
PISA
Vietnam
JEL: 
H0
I2
O1
P3
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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