group work # 2

How institution affects gender economic development

NO.	Male retirement Age	Female Retirement Age
	60	55

Table: Vietnamese age of retirement

Our group chooses Vietnam to analyze how institution affects gender economic development. We choose the policy of age of retirement in Vietnam as a particular institution to examine.

Women in Vietnam currently retire at the age of 55, a full five years earlier than men, at the age of 60. The purpose of this policy was to reduce public responsibility for women and ensure they had more time to take care of their family. This policy reflects that the state continues to place great emphasis on women’s role as mothers, and consider it as the basic values of the society. Also, the majority of the people (including women) continue to hold the belief that women are physically weaker than men and they should retire earlier, including civil servants.

First of all, this early retirement policy is resulting in unequal work opportunities. It prevents women from being promoted to higher management positions across the civil service and in turn protects men’s career promotion opportunities. This is a serious waste of human resources because at that age, women are in their highest mental demands (skills, experiences and networks).Furthermore, women in Vietnam usually live longer than men; therefore, they receive more pension payments than men. It places a heavy burden on the social security system. Its sustainability could be jeopardized in the long term without reform.

Raising women’s retirement age is one of the possible solutions to balance the fund and ensure social security system in long term. It is suggested thatwomen should be given the right to work and contribute until the age of 60. However, there are several controversial ideas about this solution such as it will limit the job opportunities for young generation who are about to enter to the labor market for the first time. Therefore, the Government of Vietnam should consider carefully revising this policy. 

Group Members

1.     Aye Chan Myae  (st116970)

2.     Le Nguyen Lan Chi (st116497)

3.     Nikita Shakya (st116512)

4.     Ying Lwin ( st116510)

Critical Refliection #1

                 Political stabilitiy in Ecnomic development

The most interesting issue I learned this week is that the political stability is vital for economic development, especially for developing countries. It make me realized that my country’s political instability is extremely effect on economic development and it leads into one of the poorest countries in the world. Therefore, the quasi civilian government tries to have political stable in order to build national reconciliation since 2011. However it is on the process of it reforms because the national ceasefire agreement has not yet achieved with ethnic armed organizations.

This realization may be important for two reasons. First, the political stability is one of the main concerns for who want to invest in the country.  The political instability in Burma is less to attract investment from both internal and international investors. Alesina and Perotti (1996) pointed out that political instability generates reducing investment. Secondly, it is more likely to promote gender equality which is really important for economic development, however, it is far to implement in Burma. The evidence showed in the gender inequality index (2013) ranked Burma in the low human development category.

This understanding will help me in a number of ways that investment really needs for developing countries and it will help to build faster economic growth by reducing poverty and creating jobs. OECD (2002) shows that foreign direct investment is effective tool for alleviating poverty in development countries. Without investments, the reducing poverty is difficult to decrease so the Burmese government aims to reduce 16% of its poverty but ADB (2012) provided the evidence that poverty reduction is further room for improvement. Due to the political unstable, the government cannot focus on promoting gender equality in Burma so that women still do not have a chance to participate in the current national unity building which interrelate with economics development.  Women are considered as secondary citizen and the culture beliefs force women to be in the private sphere. If women have equal to participate in public sphere, it can be more rapidly to obtain political stable and reduce poverty.

This knowledge will be could be applied in my future career and in my further study. The political stability is very essential for country which eager to alleviate poverty and plan to build economics prosperity community with regional governments. Moreover, implementing gender equality will be greatly benefited in this process.

References

Alesina, Alberto, and Roberto Perotti. 1996. Income distribution, political instability, and investment. European Economic Review 40(6): 1203-1228

ADB (2012) Myanmar in Transition: Opportunities and Challenges

Gender Inequality Index 2013 http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/table-4-gender-inequality-index

OECD (2002) Foreign Direct Investment for Development: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing cost

Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris and Christian Welzel (2004) Gender Equality and Democracy