Among the most thoroughly documented findings in Vietnamese migration research is that the majority of rural-urban migrants retain strong preferences for their home villages even after establishing themselves in cities. A 2017 study by Nguyen, Grote and Sharma, published in the IZA Journal of Development and Migration, analysed the migration behaviour of rural-urban migrants using panel data on 2,200 rural Vietnamese households together with a migrant tracking survey of 299 migrants. Despite documented wage gains from migration, 64 percent of migrants said they wished to return to their home village, while only 16 percent would prefer to stay in the cities — and only 36 percent of the rural households expected their migrant members to return. The return-wish rate is notably higher than in comparable studies from other lower-middle-income Asian countries, suggesting that Vietnamese rural identity and kinship networks create unusually strong pull factors toward the sending community.
The non-migration side carries documented economic costs that generate a distinct form of regret. National Statistics Office of Vietnam data for 2022 show that average monthly income per capita reached about 4.7 million VND, with urban income roughly 1.5 times rural income — a gap that persisted into 2023 (urban ~6.26 million VND vs rural ~4.17 million VND). In migration-sending villages, households with urban migrant workers can be observed consuming at substantially higher rates than non-migrant neighbours, building better housing, and funding children’s education at higher levels. IFAD country data underline the scale of the gap: in rural Vietnam, home to about 70 percent of the population, average income per capita is less than half the urban level and the rural poverty rate is nearly three times the urban rate. The income differential is large enough that relative deprivation among non-migrants in high-migration-rate communities is well-documented in the regional social science literature, even though no Vietnamese survey directly asks stayers whether they regret not migrating — which is why the inaction-side 30% is an income-gap-derived estimate rather than a measured regret rate.
The Gilovich action-dominance pattern in this entry should be interpreted with care. The high return-wish figure (64%) is consistent with Gilovich’s finding that action regrets intensify over time rather than fade, but it may also partly reflect rational life-cycle planning: many Vietnamese migrants describe their urban sojourn as a temporary earnings phase rather than a permanent relocation, and expressing a wish to return home eventually does not necessarily imply that the decision to migrate was a mistake. The inaction-side 30% proxy is constructed from relative-income and relative-deprivation data rather than a direct regret survey, which introduces measurement imprecision. The regret delta of 0.34 should be treated as a directional estimate. The decision to migrate is also not fully voluntary in many cases: debt obligations, landlessness, and family pressure in sending communities constrain the choice to stay, which means that some of the workers who report wanting to return are workers who would describe their departure as economic necessity rather than free preference.