Our project aims to understand the resilience tactics that Vietnamese households employ during exogenous shocks, assess the cost-effectiveness of these tactics, and identify the predictors of this cost-effectiveness. A large household survey will be conducted across multiple provinces in Vietnam to collect data on these aspects. The survey will consider both essential and non-essential household activities that may be disrupted by the shocks, a multitude of resilience tactics, and capture numerous individual-demographic, environmental, sociological, structural, spatial, and psychological resilience drivers. Additionally, it will measure normal non-disaster household activity output, output losses during disasters, the resilience tactics used and their costs, and the overall activity loss if no resilience tactics were employed.

The sampling method involves cluster random sampling. Vietnam’s 63 provinces will be subdivided into three groups based on income levels: high, intermediate, and low. Ten provinces will be randomly selected from each group. Within each chosen province, three urban and three rural districts will be randomly selected. Within these districts, a random walk sampling method will be used to survey households. This method involves setting off on a random route and recording every household encountered, then surveying a random sample of the recorded households. To strengthen randomization, survey assistants will not walk on the same street side twice and will return to households where eligible participants were initially absent. Local community representatives will accompany survey assistants to improve response rates and establish rapport with residents.

The collected survey data will be analyzed using a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function, informed by production theory. This theoretical approach views households as entities aiming to maximize their well-being or minimize negative impacts by strategically employing resilience tactics. It assumes households combine labor and resources efficiently to maintain or improve their well-being while facing limited substitution possibilities. The CES function incorporates parameters such as the elasticity of substitution, which measures the ease of substituting one input for another without cost penalty, and the technology parameter, which reflects efficiency and technological change. This function offers flexibility, analytical depth, and quantitative precision, allowing for a broad range of elasticity values and providing a realistic representation of the complex decision-making involved in household production processes during disruptions.