Does educational attainment and gender inequalities affect wealth accumulation? Evidence from Vietnam

Vietnamese have always believed that education is crucial in increasing income and accumulating household wealth. Educational attainment has been an indicator of successful people. As such, higher education is generally linked to higher income and wealth in Vietnam. However, the existing literature has largely neglected empirical analysis of the education-wealth relationship. We use data from the Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys (VHLSS) in ten years between 2008 and 2018 to examine the effects of educational attainment on Vietnamese households' wealth accumulation. The threshold and the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions with robust standards for cross-sectional data analysis are employed. Selected households' demographic characteristics are also incorporated in our analysis. Our results indicate that a university degree was sufficient to accumulate wealth in 2008. However, higher educational attainment is linked with higher wealth accumulation in 2018. For people without a university degree or higher, achieving intermediate vocational training certificates is required to maximize wealth accumulation in both 2008 and 2018. Our empirical results confirm that household demographic factors, including age, marital status, gender, and urban-rural living areas, significantly affect wealth accumulation. In addition, inequality in households' wealth accumulation caused by gender and urban-rural living areas declined over the ten years.