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Steady and strong growth in recent years have fueled Viet Nam’s ambitions to move up to middle.income country status. But presently it remains a low-income country.. A significant proportion of Vietnamese people live just above the poverty line. Even slight variations in the definition of poverty can push them over that line, sending the poverty rate up.

Viet Nam is primarily an agrarian society. More than three quarters of the population, and 90 per cent of poor people overall, live in rural areas, mainly near river deltas. Almost 80 per cent of the country's poor people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. The strong performance of agriculture explains the impressive progress that Viet Nam has made in overall poverty reduction. The sector has a significant potential for contributing to raise the incomes and standard of living of rural people.

The country’s poorest rural people generally have small plots of low-quality land or are landless, and their opportunities for off-farm employment are scarce. The poorest people live in remote villages in upland areas, with limited access to transportation and social interaction. Rural poor people have limited access to productive resources and basic financial services such as credit and savings. Village, commune, district and regional infrastructure is poorly developed. Rural poor people face harsh natural conditions and frequent natural disasters. They are particularly vulnerable to seasonal hardships, community-wide crises and unexpected events, such as disease, which increase a household's expenses and reduce income. Poor households tend to include more dependants, especially children. Among age groups, poverty disproportionately affects children. Poor people, particularly ethnic minorities, are often uninformed about their rights and lack access to legal assistance.

The poorest people in Viet Nam include:

Women of ethnic minorities in rural areas are hardest hit by poverty. In general,  poverty affects women more severely than men. Women lack decision-making power, have less education and have fewer opportunities than men. They bear heavy workloads and have no voice in household matters, including the crucial issue of reproduction, or in community affairs.

There are broad regional variations in the distribution of poverty. The regions with the highest relative poverty rates include the north-west, north-central, central highlands, central coast and north-east. But in terms of absolute numbers, more poor people live in the north-central and north-east regions, in the Mekong Delta and central coastal regions, which are home to seven out of ten of Viet Nam's poor people.