Ngày đăng: Tháng Bảy 7, 2023

Vietnam Freedom of the Net index 2022

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

Freedomhouse.org

Country Facts

A Obstacles to Access12/25
B Limits on Content6/35
C Violations of User Rights4/40

LAST YEAR’S SCORE & STATUS: Vietnam: 22/100 Not Free

Scores are based on a scale of 0 (least free) to 100 (most free). See the research methodology and report acknowledgements.

  • Global Freedom Score 19/100: Not Free
  • Internet Freedom Score: 22/100:  Not Free
  • Freedom in the World Status: Not Free
  • Networks Restricted: No
  • Social Media Blocked: No
  • Websites Blocked: Yes
  • Pro-government Commentators: Yes
  • Users Arrested: Yes

OVERVIEW

Internet freedom remained restricted in Vietnam, as the government enforced stringent controls over the country’s online environment. Though the government did not disrupt connectivity or throttle Facebook servers as it had done previously, the state continued mandating that companies remove content and imposed draconian criminal sentences for online expression. A COVID-19 surge in late 2021 propelled government surveillance, and authorities have also sought to expand control over content on social media platforms.

Vietnam is a one-party state, dominated for decades by the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). Although some independent candidates are technically allowed to run in legislative elections, most are banned in practice. Freedom of expression, religious freedom, and civil society activism are tightly restricted. Judicial independence is absent.

Key Developments, June 1, 2021 – May 31, 2022

  • Government officials ordered international social media companies to remove thousands of pieces of content, particularly targeting criticism of the authorities (see B2).
  • New regulations tightened content restrictions on websites that host advertisements and increased administrative fines on companies found to be hosting online speech that authorities deem illegal (see B3, B6, and C2).
  • Authorities imposed prison sentences on human rights defenders and everyday internet users for their online activities, including a ten-year sentence issued to activist Trịnh Bá Phương (see C3).
  • The expansion of government-run COVID-19 apps and the creation of a central database for new identification cards have raised privacy concerns (see C5).

A Obstacles to Access

A1 0-6 pts

Do infrastructural limitations restrict access to the internet or the speed and quality of internet connections? 4 6

The internet penetration rate was 71 percent by the end of 2021, according to data from the Ministry of Infomation and Communications (MIC).1 Mobile broadband has played a significant role in increasing access to faster internet service. As of May 2022, the median mobile download speed stood at 35.29 megabits per second (Mbps) while the upload speed stood at 16.89 Mbps according to Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index. The median fixed broadband download speed was 71.79 Mbps and upload speed was 67.20 Mbps.2 Market data aggregator Statista estimated smartphone penetration at 61.37 percent as of May 2021.3 Fixed broadband remains a relatively small market segment.

As of December 2021, 4G signal covered 99.8 percent of Vietnam’s territory, while 5G had been tested in 16 provinces, according to the MIC.4

Disruptions to international internet cables took place repeatedly during the coverage period when the country was in full or partial lockdowns due to COVID-19 outbreaks.5 In February 2022, three undersea cables—the Intra-Asia, Asia-America Gateway, and Asia-Pacific Gateway cables—were disrupted at the same time, seriously affecting internet users nationwide.6 The cables are pivotal for connectivity to the international internet.

A2 0-3 pts

Is access to the internet prohibitively expensive or beyond the reach of certain segments of the population for geographical, social, or other reasons? 2 3

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Why are Vietnam’s schools so good?

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

economist.com

It understands the value of education and manages its teachers well

Children playing football in a courtyard.
They’re on the ball image: alamy

Jun 29th 2023 | SINGAPORE

Ho chi minh, the founding father of Vietnam, was clear about the route to development. “For the sake of ten years’ benefit, we must plant trees. For the sake of a hundred years’ benefit, we must cultivate the people,” was a bromide he liked to trot out. Yet despite years of rapid economic growth, the country’s gdp per person is still only $3,760, lower than in its regional peers, Malaysia and Thailand, and barely enough to make the average Vietnamese feel well-nurtured. Still, Ho Chi Minh was alluding to a Chinese proverb extolling the benefits of education, and on that front Vietnam’s people can have few complaints.

Their children go through one of the best schooling systems in the world, a status reflected in outstanding performances in international assessments of reading, maths and science. The latest data from the World Bank show that, on aggregate learning scores, Vietnamese students outperform not only their counterparts in Malaysia and Thailand but also those in Britain and Canada, countries more than six times richer. Even in Vietnam itself, student scores do not exhibit the scale of inequality so common elsewhere between the genders and different regions.

A child’s propensity to learn is the result of several factors—many of which begin at home with parents and the environment they grow up in. But that is not enough to explain Vietnam’s stellar performance. Its distinctive secret lies in the classroom: its children learn more at school, especially in the early years.

In a study in 2020, Abhijeet Singh of the Stockholm School of Economics gauged the greater productivity of Vietnam’s schools by examining data from identical tests taken by students in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. He showed that between the ages of five and eight Vietnamese children race ahead. One more year of education in Vietnam increases the probability that a child can solve a simple multiplication problem by 21 percentage points; in India the uplift is six points.

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Vietnam’s extraordinary performance in the PISA assessment: a cultural explanation of an education paradox

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

Full paper here

This paper examines the nature and drivers of Vietnam’s paradoxical performance in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) – consistently high student achievement despite being the poorest of all participating countries and a centralized education system. The authors first document ‘Vietnam advantage’ in a wide-range of supply and demand-related indicators such as school participation rate, educational inequality, inputs and expenditure in cross-country regression models. They then estimate an augmented educational production function to show that these supply and demand-side advantages don’t explain away Vietnam’s positive deviance in PISA when compared to other participating developing and developed countries. The authors then conduct student-level analysis to examine Vietnam’s performance in PISA 2012 in a regional context, vis-a-vis three high-spending but low-performing ASEAN member countries (Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand) and two high performing Asian countries (South Korea and Singapore). Pooled regression estimates show that, holding differences in various indices of socioeconomic background, the gap in average student test scores between Vietnam and South Korea in Reading and Science becomes statistically insignificant. Moreover, once school-specific differences are also accounted for, Vietnamese students do just as well as Singaporean across all subjects – equalizing for existing socioeconomic differences between countries would give Vietnam an even better advantage in the PISA. A similar gain in PISA scores is absent in the case of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. The paper concludes by offering a cultural explanation for the significant variation in educational performance among high-spending East Asian countries.