Consultant/team of consultants to conduct Market Systems Assessment for Productivity Ecosystems for Decent Work in Vietnam in selected sectors

The Productivity Ecosystems for Decent Work Programme (PE4DW), launched jointly by the SME unit of the ILO Enterprises Department and the Employment Policy Department, together with the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), aims at addressing constraints to productivity growth and decent job creation. The Programme was launched in 2022 and will run until the end of 2025. It is being piloted in Ghana, South Africa and Viet Nam and implemented by the ILO Enterprises and Employment Departments.

The decade following the global financial crisis has witnessed consistent decline in productivity growth, a development that has been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic. This trend is of particular concern to most emerging and developing economies. Here, the contribution of structural transformation (i.e. labour reallocation toward higher-productivity sectors as well as within-sector transformation) to productivity growth has slowed down and integration in global and regional value chains, which is key to boosting technology transfers, digitalization and improved management processes at enterprise level, is decreasing. The strong growth in services sectors in many emerging and developing countries has also led to increased divergence in productivity, especially in those countries where jobs are moving from agriculture directly to services, bypassing manufacturing. Rather than generating productive employment, this trend has expanded low-productivity informal jobs in the services sector while leaving low-productivity jobs in agriculture as the main provider of employment in developing countries.

Achieving a virtuous cycle between productivity growth, employment creation and the promotion of decent work is required if economic growth is to lead to poverty alleviation and prosperity. To create and strengthen this virtuous cycle, the ILO proposes the Productivity Ecosystems for Decent Work Programme. The Programme is built on the recognition that productivity growth is determined by a myriad of interfacing dynamics across policy, markets and enterprises. Furthermore, the virtuous cycle between productivity and decent work, where productivity growth leads to decent job creation and vice-versa, is not automatic.

Therefore, rather than using a “one size fits all” approach or intervening at a single level, the Programme will address productivity and decent work deficits across policy, sector and enterprise levels for win-win solutions that improve productivity and that ensure, through social dialogue and workplace cooperation, that gains from productivity growth and decent work are distributed equitably. For this purpose, the Programme has selected a “slice” of the local productivity ecosystem, i.e., 2 sectors and associated segments of the overall ecosystem in which the potential for productivity growth and decent job creation are aligned with feasibility to intervene. In the selected sectors, an in-depth market systems assessment will elucidate the root causes of low productivity and decent work deficits as well as identify opportunities for the Programme to strengthen productivity and decent job creation in the sector.

In Vietnam the productivity agenda has high priority for the Government, where the national productivity programme (Nb 712) was declared almost 10 years ago, and extended in Aug 2020 by the decision of Prime Minister (Nb. 1322) for 2020-2030. A separate national productivity programme on science and technology was developed in 2021 (Nb. 36). However, despite this declared political will to promote productivity growth, the results of policies remain unclear for variety of reasons; among them lack of tangible incentives for firms and workers, but essentially there is a need for precise design and detailed plan on how to achieve the productivity goal. The ILO’s PE4DW programme therefore aims to engage stakeholders into testing and piloting approaches at all 3 layers of intervention (enterprise, sector, and national level), and generating evidences on promoting more productivity in 2 sub-sectors of the economy for effective policy making for Government and social partners in Vietnam.

In the framework of the project inception phase, a sector selection study is currently underway to identify 2 subsectors in Vietnam for PE4DW to focus on and to test the planned approaches. The results of the sector selection will be known early August 2022.

The current assignment aims at detailing the specific types of intervention activities that PE4DW will implement based on the root causes of underperformance of market systems in each of the selected sectors in Vietnam. Market systems development is a widely recognized approach by development practitioners and ultimately aspires at achieving lasting change by intervening in market systems through coherent, systemic, and rigorous approach1.

The assignment is expected to require tentatively 25 days of full-time expert work per one sub-sector to be delivered by individual consultant or team of national and international consultants.

Date for Submissions: August 14, 2022, midnight Hanoi time zone (GMT+7)

Address for Applications: Proposals should be sent in English in electronic format to Mai Nguyen Thi Hong, International Labour Organization (main@ilo.org)