This study examines multidimensional poverty in Vietnam using the method of Alkire and Foster (2007, 2011) and
household data from Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys 2010 and 2012. The poverty is analyzed in five
dimensions including health, education, insurance and social support, living condition, and social participation. The
result shows that multidimensional poverty has decreased slightly during the 2010-2012 period. There is a large
difference between multidimensional poverty and expenditure/income based poverty. While Northern Mountain is the
poorest region in terms of income or expenditure, Mekong River Delta is the poorest region in terms of
multidimensional poverty. The decomposition analysis shows that the ethnic minority group has a small proportion of
population but contributes largely to the national multidimensional poverty. We also decompose the total
multidimensional poverty into the contribution of five dimensions. We find that the deprivation of dimension ‘Social
insurance and social assistance' contributes the most to the total poverty, while the deprivation of dimension ‘Living
conditions' contributes the least to the total poverty.