Trinh Pham (Phạm Thị Tuyết Trinh)
Hello and thank you for visiting my page.
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics at Cornell University.
My research interests are in the intersection of development and environmental economics. My current research examines the inter-relationship between environmental changes, agriculture, human capital formation and labor markets in developing countries, as well as their implications for socio-economic inequality.
Please feel free to contact me via email at tp347[at]cornell[dot]edu.
Structural Transformation, Agriculture, Climate, and the Environment
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, forthcoming.
with Christopher B. Barrett and Ariel Ortiz-Bobea
This paper reviews the feedbacks between structural transformation and agriculture, on the one hand, and climate and the natural environment, on the other. The longstanding, dominant economic development narrative largely ignores nature’s influence on factor productivity and stocks, even as it increasingly illustrates how agricultural technological change and economic growth affect nature. We articulate some of the missing linkages and pose a range of policy research questions worth exploration concerning structural transformation and the complex feedback among agriculture, nature, and economic growth processes, especially in the low-income agrarian nations of the Global South.
The Child Education and Health Ethnic Inequality Consequences of Climate Shocks in Vietnam
Economics of Education Review, 2022, 90: 102311.
The Intertemporal Evolution of Agriculture and Labor over a Rapid Structural Transformation: Lessons from Vietnam
Food Policy, 2020, 94: 101913.
with Yanyan Liu, Christopher B. Barrett and William Violette
We combine nationally representative household and labor force survey data from 1992 to 2016 to provide a detailed description of rural labor market evolution and how it relates to the structural transformation of rural Vietnam, especially within the agricultural sector. Our study adds to the emerging literature on structural transformation in low-income countries using micro-level data and helps to answer several policy-related questions. We find limited employment creation potential of agriculture, especially for youth. Rural-urban real wage convergence has gone hand-in-hand with increased diversification of the rural economy into the non-farm sector nationwide and rapid advances in educational attainment in all sectors’ and regions’ workforce. Minimum wage laws seem to have played no significant role in increasing agricultural wages. This enhanced integration also manifests in steady attenuation of the longstanding inverse farm size-yield relationship. Farming has remained securely household-based and the family farmland distribution has remained largely unchanged. Small farm sizes have not obstructed mechanization nor the uptake of labor-saving pesticides, consistent with factor substitution induced by rising real wage rates. As rural households rely more heavily on the labor market, human capital accumulation (rather than land endowments) have become the key correlate of improvements in rural household well-being.
Climate Change and Intersectoral Labor Reallocation in a Developing Country
Cornell University