| Abstract | Presently, while Vietnam enjoys a period of rapid development and growth, it also faces major
social and economic structural challenges. Those challenges include how to stop a widening
gap between rural and urban incomes; how to absorb a growing rural population into a
shrinking rural labour market; how to stem rural-urban migration; how to most effectively use
Vietnam's main comparative advantage - its labour force - in the process of national
development. At the same time, researchers and development policy-makers worldwide are
paying increasing attention to the study of the rural non-farm sector. They hope that within
the rural non-farm sector might lie some of the answers to the challenges that face rapidly
growing transitional rural economies like Vietnam.
This study is a contribution to the increasing attention to the rural non-farm sector in the
international and Vietnamese context. It takes as its subject 'rural household enterprises', not
medium enterprises or small enterprises, but enterprises at the lowest, household level. These
are the enterprises that might be multiplied most quickly, and might be most easily controlled
by the poorest people themselves. This might be the sector that can provide the best solutions
to some of the most pressing regional and rural development challenges in Vietnam today.
The study examines the factors that influence the access of rural people to the household
enterprise sector, using a relatively remote commune in Thai Nguyen Province as the study
area. The objectives are to identify internal and external factors, which facilitate or hinder
entry into the sector. The study considers the factors as they effect sub-groups of would-be
entrepreneurs at different stages of their life-cycle - single, newly-married group, married
group from aged 27-40, married group from 41-54, and elderly group aged 55 and above.
Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied in order to reach the most
accurate interpretation of the outcomes of the research work.
Significant differences among sub-groups were found in a set of internal factors such as
motivational factor, gender, skills and experiences, family savings, and familial factors such as
family relationship and conflicts. Regarding the external factors, differences among subgroups were found most clearly in external capital sources particularly access to loans from
the banks. With regards to community attitude factor, while there was presence of negative
attitude towards enterprises run by those in all sub-groups, peer pressure among the Old
people was found to be constraining the entry into entrepreneurship by the old people. In
social network factor, single group particularly those who just left school was found to lack
sufficient social network. There were also common external factors that facilitate all subgroups into entrepreneurship such as infrastructure, taxes and business registration, success of
other enterprises.
An in-depth analysis of the poor and their access to non-farm enterprises was undertaken,
revealing the integrated nature of their difficulties, and their entry constraint factors in
accessing to non-farm enterprises. These factors are limited capital, skills and social contacts.
A set of recommendations is provided, which corresponds to the main findings, in order to
facilitate interventions to stimulate the rural household enterprise sector.
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