Labour Productivity and Personnel Costs in Vietnamese Enterprises: The Gap Across Ownership Sectors

Vietnam’s enterprise sector is organised around three ownership groups that differ sharply in size, capital and access to markets: state-owned enterprises (SOEs), non-state domestic firms and foreign-invested (FDI) firms. This paper documents how labour productivity and personnel costs compare across these groups and how the gaps evolved between 2016 and 2023. It uses only official secondary data from the enterprise census and annual enterprise surveys published by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam (GSO), in particular the national indicator tables of the 2025 White Book on Vietnamese Enterprises, supplemented by earlier editions. No econometric model is estimated. Instead, the study combines ratio analysis, relative-gap indices, an accounting split of personnel costs relative to turnover and profit, and a shift-share decomposition of aggregate turnover per worker. Three findings stand out. SOEs generate about twice the net turnover per worker of non-state firms and pay about 1.7 times as much, but they do so with roughly three times as much capital per worker, so their pay premium mirrors capital intensity more than labour effort. FDI firms pay about 26 per cent more than non-state firms while producing slightly less turnover per worker, which gives them the highest personnel cost share of turnover (7.2–8.0 per cent) and the widest pay-to-productivity ratio. Most strikingly, average income per worker rose by almost exactly the same proportion in all three groups (about 34 per cent in nominal terms) even though turnover per worker, capital per worker and profit per worker grew at very different rates. Wage growth thus appears to follow a common economy-wide path rather than sector-specific productivity. Almost all of the rise in aggregate turnover per worker came from improvements within sectors rather than from labour moving between them. The paper discusses what these patterns imply for wage policy, SOE governance and the upgrading of domestic private firms.