The survey was conducted by ECA International, a London-based company that sells marketing information.

According to the report, cited by VnExpress, Vietnam is ranked second, just after India, on the list of top 20 countries with the highest real salary growth, which means salary growth with the inflation rate taken into account.

The projected real salary growth for Vietnam in 2020 is 5.4%, followed by Indonesia (4.6%), Cambodia (4.1%) and Thailand (4.2%).

"Workers in Vietnam and Thailand will both see further increases to their salaries, as the nominal salaries expected to be given by employers stay well ahead of the low levels of inflation that these countries will see in 2020," said Lee Quan, ECA’s regional director of Asia.

However, it’s worth noting that the ECA study, conducted between August and September, only looks at multinational companies across different sectors in 68 countries, which doesn’t fully reflect the bigger picture in Vietnam.

A report by the Fair Labor Association on fair compensation in factories done in April this year found that most of the time, a higher salary doesn’t mean a worker was paid more for their work. The seemingly positive number is more of a reflection of workers being paid significantly lower than the living wage, which then leads to most of them relying on overtime work to earn enough for their basic needs. 

"Vietnamese workers are almost twice as likely to be denied a rest day, four times as likely to be denied a meal or rest break, and work overtime at a rate of seven percent greater than the global average," the report's authors wrote.

[Photo via Flickr user ILO Asia-Pacific]