Book Description

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the demographic and socioeconomic consequences of wars, using the case of the Vietnam War and its effects on the Vietnamese population. Using mainly the 1989 and 1999 census microdata, it focuses on the effects of the last ten years of the Vietnam War (or the "American War") from 1965 to 1975, characterized by the escalation of the war with a large presence of American troops in Vietnam and extensive aerial bombings by the United States. The dissertation consists of two descriptive chapters and two analytical chapters. In the first descriptive chapter, I summarize existing estimates of mortality in Vietnam covering the period before, during, and after the war. I find evidence of increased mortality among young men during wartime, but raised mortality among children and the general population is not observed. Next, I examine whether the Vietnamese population age and sex structure show evidence of the war's imprints. Indeed, the 1989 and 1999 Vietnamese censuses reveal that the war left a mark on the cohorts that were in their 20s and 30s during 1965-1975, by reducing their numbers relative to their surrounding cohorts and by skewing the sex ratios. In the first analytical chapter, I examine marriage patterns in Vietnam between 1979 and 1999 using census data. Using a marriage squeeze index that applies the age-specific probability of first marriage estimated using the Coale-McNeil marriage model to the population, I show that Vietnam experienced a severe marriage squeeze in 1979 and 1989, but the squeeze had been alleviated by 1999. Furthermore, the dissertation investigates the relationship between the marriage squeeze and two war-related causes of the squeeze: excess male mortality and emigration. While the relationship between excess male mortality and the marriage squeeze was not observed, the results indicate that disproportionate male emigration is likely to be a major factor in bringing about the marriage squeeze. Lastly, the dissertation explores the long-term effects of early-life exposure to the war, examining educational attainment, literacy, marriage, and employment outcomes of those who experienced the war as infants and in utero, using the difference-in-differences technique. Separate analyses were conducted for North and South Vietnam. The results reveal adverse effects of early-life exposure to the war on marriage and employment in the north and on employment in the south. Mixed results are seen on literacy and educational outcomes.