Socioeconomic determinants of income loss during COVID-19 in a mountainous area in Vietnam

Identifying vulnerable socioeconomic groups enables policymakers to design relevant intervention strategies and garner the support necessary to implement them. Previous studies indicate that COVID-19 contributed to widening socioeconomic inequalities, but a gap remains in understanding the impacts of the pandemic on ethnic groups in mountainous areas in Vietnam. We conducted interviews and applied logistic regression methods to analyse the relationships between socioeconomic factors and the likelihood of losing income due to the pandemic. We found that Indigenous people, communes, jobholders with more physical contact at work, groups that include more boys, and smaller residential landholders were more likely to suffer from COVID-19-related income loss. The findings of this study enable the Vietnamese Government and practitioners to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 on households in mountainous areas. This study may guide the government toward developing policies for reducing the impact of similar pandemics on those groups in mountainous locations.