Agricultural land conversion for industrialization : livelihood along rural-urban continuum and mechanism of social differentiation in Hung Yen province, Vietnam

The high rate of agricultural land conversion for industrialization causes the complex agrarian transformation in current Vietnamese land regime.This research investigates the mechanisms of social differentiation by analyzing the ways in which different rural households construct their livelihood strategies along the rural-urban continuum to response to agricultural land conversion. The study shows that the spatial and sectoral interfaces generate the peculiar mechanisms of social differentiation which include : i. the land alternations caused by the boosting land market as the motivation for land concentration and informal land usage changes; ii. the possibilities of capital accumulation from lucrative economic activities. This paper discusses the growing diversity of surviving and accumulating means in the wider range of rural-urban and agriculture-industry linkages.