Hanoi’s Informal Sector and the Vietnamese Economy: A Case Study of Roving Street Vendors

Abstract

This article analyzes the results of survey data on roving street vendors of Hanoi. It describes the continued ties of these members of the urban informal sector to the rural sector of the economy, analyzes the allocation of their labor between the two sectors, and establishes the importance of the incomes they earn as street vendors in the context of other measures of household expenditure and of poverty levels in Vietnam. The survey results are also compared to those from other empirical studies of the informal sector in Vietnam and to more general literature about the informal sector.