What Vietnam appears to have done in the past, if someone became unemployed they received a one time lump sum of money. In a rural peasant economy that money could be used by the terminated worker to go back to his or her family village and buy a plot of land and return to being a peasant.
Thus this was both a retirement plan and an unemployment plan. You worked, paid into the system, your employment ended and you were paid one large lump sum that you could use to buy land to farm. Thus it was an effective unemployment AND retirement plan given Vietnam use to be a mostly rural peasant society.
The problem is today, Vietnam is becoming an urban society and industry wants a pool of workers it can hire from. The lump sum payments tended to take those workers out of that pool of workers and return them to being peasants (and it appears a lot of those workers LIKED the idea of returning to being peasants for it means they had LAND to farm and feed themselves and their families). Thus the decision to change the system to a retirement program one gets when a man turns 60 or a woman turns 55 (When they can buy a farm, which a lot of first and second generation American urban dwellers often dream of, returning to their rural farming roots, it takes the third to fourth generation of urban living to give up that dream).
Side note: The First US Census where more Americans lived in Urban Areas as oppose to Rural Areas was the 1920 census. You had an additional mass movement of Rural dwellers to urban areas in the Great Depression of the 1930s and a slow but steady draw from rural areas post WWII. Most of these former rural dwellers and their children had dreams of returning to the farm, it is the third and fourth generation off the farm where returning to the farm finally disappears. In the US we are into that third or fourth generation off the farm, but Vietnam is still in its first generation off the farm so the draw of the farm still exist very deeply in those urban workers.
Thus this is more a decision that the urban pool of workers should be maintained, that they should get a retirement plan but only AFTER they are getting to old to be part of the pool of workers for industry. The ruling elite of Vietnam do NOT want the young and middle age workers to take their lump sum and return to the farm. Instead the ruling elite wants them to continue to work in urban areas.
The decision to go to monthly payments instead of a lump sum is another way to expand the urban pool of workers. When people get a lump sum, even after age 60, the option of taking that sum and buying land has a strong appeal to them. It provides something "Real" i.e. LAND. Monthly payments go to surviving in an urban environment where you wait for the check each month. This does NOT fully remove you from the pool of workers, such retirees, even in the US, continue to work. If they had a lump sum, many older workers would opt to purchase of some land to farm, for them they can work at their own pace or rent out what they can not use to others. I know several older people who would love this option, return to the farm and plant crops in their old age. Given that Vietnam is NOT that far from being a mostly rural society, that pull on older workers I suspect is strong, and remains strong even in their children. Thus the lump sum payment permits return to rural living, while the ending of such payment KILLS SUCH DREAMS. When you kill a dream prepare for a negative reaction and that appears to be what is happening in Vietnam.
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