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The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havoc on economies around the world. The purpose of this study is to learn about the distributional impacts of the pandemic.

The authors contribute new theoretical and empirical evidence on the distributional impacts of the pandemic on different income groups in a multicountry setting. The authors analyze rich individual-level survey data covering 6,082 respondents from China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results are robust to various econometric models, including ordinary least squares (OLS), Tobit and ordered probit models with country-fixed effects.

The authors find that while the outbreak has no impact on household income losses, it results in a 63% reduction in the expected own labor income for the second-poorest income quintile. The pandemic impacts are most noticeable for savings, with all the four poorer income quintiles suffering reduced savings ranging between 5 and 7% compared to the richest income quintile. The poor are also less likely to change their behaviors regarding immediate prevention measures against COVID-19 and healthy activities. The authors also found countries to exhibit heterogeneous impacts.

Designing tailor-made social protection and health policies to support the poorer income groups in richer and poorer countries can generate multiple positive impacts that help minimize the negative and inequality-enhancing pandemic consequences. These findings are relevant not only for COVID-19 but also for future pandemics.

The authors theoretically and empirically investigate the impacts of the pandemic on poorer income groups, while previous studies mostly offer empirical analyses and focus on other sociodemographic factors. The authors offer a new multicountry analysis of several prevention measures against COVID-19 and specific health activities.

Building on my earlier work (Dang, 2007, 2008), this chapter provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of the trends in private tutoring between 1998 and 2006 using all available data.

This chapter analyzes data from different sources, including (i) the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Measurement Survey (VHLSS), (ii) the 1997–1998 Vietnam Living Standards Measurement Survey (VLSS), (iii) the 2008 Vietnam Household Testing Survey (VHTS), and (iv) local press in Vietnam. Quantitative methods are used.

Several (micro-)correlates are examined that are found to be strongly correlated with student attendance at tutoring, including household income, household heads’ education and residence areas, student current grade level, ethnicity, and household sizes. In particular, I focus on the last three variables that received little attention in the previous literature on the determinants of tutoring.

This chapter provides an updated and systematic review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam. Findings are highly relevant to the ongoing debates on private tutoring among all stakeholders in Vietnam, as well as policymakers/researchers in other countries. Suggestions are proposed on current gaps in the literature for future research.

How much work is “too much” for children aged 10–14 in Egypt? Our narrow focus here is on “work that does not interfere with school attendance.” For girls, work includes time spent in household chores and subsistence activities. We estimate simultaneous hours of work and school attendance equations as a joint Tobit and Probit model, then conduct simulations. Substantial negative effects on attendance are observed above about 10 hours per week (girls) and 14 hours (boys). For girls, heavy household work appears causal, but for boys, it seems that poor schooling leads to boys' dropout, then subsequent work.

This paper aims to examine the factors associated with a household business entrepreneur’s decisions to formalise the firm at a multidimensions level.

The data set is a panel of 2,336 SMEs and household businesses from Vietnamese SME surveys during the 2005–2015 period.

This study elucidates how firm-level resources, entrepreneur characteristics and costs of doing business influence an entrepreneur’s decision to enter, the speed and the degree of formality.

This study provides insight into the origins of an entrepreneur’s decisions to the multidimensions of business formality through the lenses of the resource-based view, entrepreneurship and institution theories.