Third training on VNMOD – a tax-benefit microsimulation model for Viet Nam

The third training event on VNMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Viet Nam, will introduce participants with earlier experience on using the model to its most recent version, with a goal of promoting its use for evidence-based policy making among government officials.

The training is geared towards 10 participants consisting of representatives from academia and government entities such as the General Statistics Office Of Viet Nam (GSO) and the National Centre for Socio-economic Information and Forecast (NCIF).

In addition to providing an overview of the model, the event will include several exercises. Attendees will complete the workshop with an appreciation of how to navigate and interpret the VNMOD user interface; how to run VNMOD; how to build and implement basic policy reforms; and how to interpret the output using Statistics Presenter. Training programme also covers an introduction to an ongoing study, led by UNU-WIDER, on analyzing the distributional effects of COVID-19 and remedial public policy measures adopted in Viet Nam.

The training courses under the SOUTHMOD project are intended to be organized as in-person events. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the VNMOD course was converted into a hybrid version where participants assemble at the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), with trainers from the VNMOD national team present at the venue and additional trainers supporting the workshop remotely from the UK (SASPRI) and Finland (UNU-WIDER).

About VNMOD

UNU-WIDER, the University of Essex in the UK, and SASPRI work together on a collaboration called SOUTHMOD. The goal of the project is to promote tax-benefit microsimulation modelling in developing countries using the EUROMOD software. 

As part of the SOUTHMOD collaboration a stand-alone tax-benefit microsimulation for Viet Nam, VNMOD, was built in collaboration with colleagues at CIEM and KU Leuven. VNMOD model itself is freely accessible for non-commercial research use but input data has to be manually constructed. Access to the model and the Stata do-files necessary to produce the underpinning data set that corresponds to the model can be requested here.