This article investigates the process of reducing poverty in ethnic minority households. Using two recent Vietnam household surveys, we find that ethnic minority households are more likely to be persistently poor and less likely to be persistently non-poor than ethnic majority households. The within-group component generated by the variation in income within each ethnicity group explains more than 90% of the change in total inequality. Income redistribution plays an important role in decreasing the poverty gap and decreasing poverty severity. Different ethnic groups have different poverty patterns, which should be noted when designing policies to alleviate poverty and inequality.

This paper examines how obstacles in access to finance, labour regulations, and employment quality affect employment growth and the permanent worker ratio at the firm level. Using firm-level data of 11,691 firms in 33 low-income and middle-income countries in Europe and Central Asia, where unemployment rates are the highest worldwide, this paper demonstrates that access to finance and employment quality obstacles hinder employment growth. The paper also shows that the greater the obstacles in access to finance and labour regulations, the lower the permanent worker ratio. The findings are robust when applying a two-stage least-squares method to address endogeneity issues. Furthermore, quantile regression analysis shows that access to finance obstacles impede the lowest-growth firms the most and the highest-growth firms the least. Our results indicate that significant financial and regulatory reforms are needed to spur sustainable employment growth.