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| At a WinCommerce supermarket__Photo: VNA |
From 2028, Vietnam is expected to start publishing the annual minimum living standards, which will serve as a basis for determining the national poverty line, minimum wages as well as other social security policies.
This initiative is outlined in a Prime Minister decision drafted by the Ministry of Finance, approving the Scheme for the formulation and announcement of annual minimum living standards.
According to the draft, minimum living standard is defined as the level of expenditure required to meet basic material and spiritual needs of a resident, allowing him to maintain a normal standard of living. This would serve as an essential reference for setting poverty thresholds, formulating social assistance policies, and adjusting region-based minimum wages for workers.
The draft scheme sets a specific target of improving the quality of statistical data used to calculate the population’s minimum living standards, ensuring that the minimum living standard data, classified by urban and rural areas, would be published every year from 2026 onward. Another target is to publish data on the minimum living standards for workers on an annual basis, beginning in 2028.
To achieve these targets, the draft proposes several solutions. These include researching and implementing a plan on surveying household living standards to ensure data collection for calculation of the minimum living standards of citizens in urban and rural areas. In addition, calculation methods and data sources for determining workers’ minimum living standards would be established based on the Cost of Basic Needs (CBN) method, which identifies the lists of essential food and non-food items and criteria for determining the quantities of these items in the minimum living standards.
Other solutions cover calculation of the minimum living standards for both residents and workers, and formulation of plans for annual publication of these figures.
As for the implementation roadmap, a plan on surveying the household living standards would be developed and realized in 2026, while a separate plan for workers’ expenditure survey would be designed. During 2027-28, the workers’ expenditure survey would be implemented on a pilot basis together with the calculation of the minimum living standards for residents and workers. The findings would then be reviewed, evaluated and reported to the Prime Minister and related agencies in 2028.- (VLLF)
