The thesis contains four essays on 'Inequality, Rural Development and Food Policy in Vietnam'. Re-examining the sources of ethnic inequality, the first essay uses instrumental variable approaches to provide consistent estimators of explanatory variables at household and commune levels for ethnic differences in household expenditure per person. Four key conclusions are drawn. First, removing language barriers significantly reduces ethnic inequality, especially through enhancing the gains earned by minorities from education. Second, variations in returns to education favour the majority in mixed communes, suggesting that special needs of minority students have not been adequately addressed, or that there exists unequal treatment in the labour market. Third, with the exception of hard-surfaced roads, there is little difference in the benefits drawn from enhanced infrastructure at the commune level across ethnic groups. Finally, contrary to established views, we find that as much as 49 to 66 percent of the ethnic gap is attributed to differences in endowments, not to differences in the returns to endowments. The second essay analyses the properties of the fixed-effects vector decomposition estimator, an emerging and popular technique for estimating time-invariant variables in panel data models with group effects. The formal analysis finds: (1) This decomposition is equivalent to a standard instrumental variables approach, for a specific set of instruments. (2) The estimator reproduces classical fixed-effects estimates for time-varying variables exactly. (3) The standard errors recommended for this estimator are too small for both time-varying and time-invariant variables. (4) The estimator is inconsistent when the time-invariant variables are endogenous. (5) The reported sampling properties in the original Monte Carlo evidence do not account for the presence of group effects. (6) The decomposition estimator has a higher risk than existing shrinkage approaches, unless the endogeneity problem is known to be small or no relevant instruments exist. The third essay examines the effects of extensive land and market reform in Vietnam on rice output and incomes, principally illustrated with measures of total factor productivity, net incomes and net returns in rice production from 1985- 2006. Results also show considerable gains in major rice growing areas, but recent evidence of a productivity 'slow down'. The differences over time and region speak to existing land use practice, calling for further reform. Stochastic frontier estimations detail the effects of remaining institutional and policy constraints, including existing restrictions on land use, ambiguous property rights, and inadequate markets for land and access to extension services and credit. The fourth essay analyses Vietnam's rice export policy and recent export ban in the context of rising food prices, drawing on insights from a regionally-disaggregated or 'bottom-up' CGE model and a micro-simulation using household data. Three main conclusions are drawn. First, although there is little impact on GDP, there are substantial distributional impacts across regions and households from different export policies and market conditions. Second, both rural and urban households, including poor households, benefit from free trade, even though domestic rice prices are higher. Finally, under free trade, relatively large gains accrue to rural households, where poverty is most pervasive
