Do Long Term Savings Motives Foster Household Participation and Contribution to Savings Mechanisms in Rural Vietnam?

The paper aims to investigate the impacts of long-term savings motives on fostering household participation and contribution to savings mechanisms in rural Vietnam. The paper is organized in five parts: introduction, data description, methodology, empirical results, and conclusion. The quantitative methodology is employed and three simultaneous estimation methods, including instrumental variable model, two-step model, and Heckman model are used to test these impacts as well as the robustness of results. In each model, the paper examines the impacts of independent factors on both household participation and household contribution to savings mechanisms. Two sets of independent variables: long-term savings motives (profit-making investment, accumulation for big expenditure, providing for old age, and cost of educations) and control variables (dependency rate, number of people in household, and household wealth) are in each model. A set of dataset of 2,314 households for analysis is obtained from household survey in rural Vietnam. Robust statistical findings indicate that profit-making investment emerged to be the strongest motive fostering household participation to savings mechanisms while other long-term savings motives have little or no impact on fostering household participation to savings mechanisms. In addition, education investment encourages household contribution to savings mechanisms in rural Vietnam.