This book comprises five major chapters. They focus on two main impacts from economic development in Vietnam. Firstly, it is about social problem of income inequality. Secondly, the impact of environmental factors is to rice production. Each researches use a different datasets for empirical analysis with two datasets from authors' survey and two datasets of VHLSSs (Viet Nam Household Living Standard Surveys) for the year 2004 and 2008. The results from the studies show five critical issues in Viet Nam at the moment. They are income inequality between the Kinh and the ethnic minorities, the different of economic development in between regions, the dimensional factors from agriculture production to income inequality, the impact of environmental factors to rice productivity and rice profit. These results indicate the policy implications for solving these problems of income inequality by providing incentives for economic development in ethnic and mountainous areas. Regarding to rice production, the government needs to improve the irrigated water quality by using policy and economic instruments with polluters are recommended to minimize the inefficiency for rice producers.

I am a PhD candidate at Kyushu University, Japan. My first degree was warded from Tay Nguyen University, Viet Nam in 1999. Since then, I have experiences in working as various positions such as development specialist and policy researcher for the government and NGOs, and in traveling to the whole of my country and to many others in the world.