Economic social stratification in urban and rural families in Vietnam today

Abstract

In recent years, the living standards of Vietnamese families have achieved remarkable improvements due to great achievements in the progress of industrialization, modernization as well as the economical and social growth of the country.  The big gap in living standards, however, of rural and urban families has pictured the social stratification in Vietnam. Social stratification is a structural inequality of all human societies except those primitive ones in the early time of primitive communal society. It is the differentiation of the economic position or the properties owned, of the political position or the power, of the social position or reputation. There are more different criteria such as education, jobs, life styles, fashion, home types, residence, art favorite, and level of consumption. Among those criteria, economy is the basic and foundational one which has ability to determine the rest factors. In this article, the authors focused on analyzing the reality of social stratification’s economy in Vietnamese families on the basic of some following dimensions such as income, labor and careers, expenditure (on daily life, education and medical) of urban and rural households.