Search

A major objective of economic development or growth is poverty reduction, and it is especially a high priority in developing, low-income economies such as Vietnam. Vietnam is an important transition open high-growth economy since Doi Moi in 1987 and with increasing global geopolitical influence in South East Asia but with concerning high poverty incidence. While poverty is recognised internationally as a multidimensional incidence with interdependent relationships among the country's many activities in the sense of Marshall or Haavelmo, rigorous studies with focus on these multidirectional causality issues for Vietnam are currently very limited. The paper addresses these issues by introducing an endogeneity or simultaneous multi-equation modelling approach with World Bank and other international data and system estimation to studying the growth-poverty relationship with Vietnam as a case study. The objective is to explore empirical evidence for this causal relationship with an economy-wide transmission mechanism and with common causality postulates for the improvement of sustainable growth and poverty reduction strategic policy analysis. The main findings show growth-poverty circular causality and the strong impact of growth on poverty reduction and of trade openness on growth. The approach advances the literature, and the findings are also a useful guide for aid consultants, economic researchers, policy makers, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), and official development assistance (ODA) donors in Vietnam in particular and in developing countries in general.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to adopt the theory of planned behavior to close the entrepreneurial attitude-intention-behavior gap in the entrepreneurship field as well as test the key moderators of the entrepreneurial process, starting from entrepreneurial attitude and intention to behavior to engage in entrepreneurial activities -- namely, entrepreneurship education. Design/methodology/approach: The research used a sample of 2,566 students from 16 universities in Vietnam. First, Cronbach's alpha and confirmatory factor analysis have been used to test the reliability and validity of scales. Then the coefficient paths in the conceptual framework were tested through structural equation modeling, and indirect associations were estimated via the PROCESS bootstrapping approach. Findings: The research illustrated that both attitudes toward entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intention serve as the central antecedents in the formation of entrepreneurial behavior. Also, when students are more entrepreneurially educated, the linkage between attitude toward entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behavior was hypothesized to become stronger, yet the relation between entrepreneurial intention and behavior was weakened. Practical implications: This research suggests useful recommendations for educators and policymakers to encourage university students' favorable attitudes toward entrepreneurial activities, their intention to engage in them and their subsequent entrepreneurial behavior. Originality/value: This research is expected to make a significant contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by closing the entrepreneurial attitude-intention-behavior gap as well as enriching our understanding of the influence of entrepreneurship education on the entrepreneurial process. Importantly, this research reveals that entrepreneurial education significantly moderates the effects of attitude toward entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intention on entrepreneurial behavior.

Scholars have recognized the need for further research to explore the role of institutional factors in social entrepreneurship (SE) within emerging markets (Urban and Kujinga, 2017). In response, this study investigates how the institutional environment influences the antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention (SEI) in Vietnam by expanding the SEI model of Mair and Noboa (2006). Drawing data from 401 university students in Vietnam, this study employed Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine the research hypotheses and model. The results reveal that social entrepreneurial self-efficacy (SES) and perceived social support (PSS) significantly and positively influence the intention to become a social entrepreneur, while empathy (EMP) and moral obligation (MO) show no effect. Furthermore, the institutional environment, comprising the regulatory dimension (RD), normative dimension (ND), and cognitive dimension (CD), plays a crucial role in boosting EMP, MO, SES, and PSS. This study contributes to SE literature by extending established intention models with the inclusion of institutional dimensions. Additionally, the findings of this study imply that policymakers should design SE-supportive policies and regulations, and create a culture that values and promotes SE in order to encourage social innovation and reduce barriers to entry for social ventures. Educators should also increase opportunities for students to experience SE and develop entrepreneurial skills in order to enhance their perception of cognitive and normative environments, making SE a more attractive career option.

This paper conducted an indepth assessment on the efficiency of the impacts of trade agreements on rice exports during the period from 2000 to 2015. Based on the secondary data published by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam and the World Bank, the study employed random boundary gravity model to quantify the capacity of Vietnam to exploit rice export potential when participating in trade agreements, or in other words, to estimate the inefficiency in operation of rice export activities of Vietnam under the impact of trade agreements. The results show that rice export activities have not promoted well (at a low level) the impact of the trade agreements that Vietnam has participated in and not all trade agreements have a trend to increase the capacity to exploit rice export potential. Since then, this study provides some recommendations to improve the impact of trade agreements on rice exports in developing countries including Vietnam.

The ownership - efficiency relationship in a firm has always been an important topic. In this paper, we focus on the state owned versus non-state-owned status of Vietnamese manufacturing firms, to shed light into the relationship between these two variables when using a more state-of-the-art method as a stochastic meta-frontier method. Applying the method for two periods: one during the global economic crisis and the other after the end of the crisis, the study determines that in both periods, there was a strong evidence that non-state-owned firms performed much better than state owned counterpart. We also found that the difference became even larger during the harsh time and sub-industries with non-state-owned firms could outperform the state-owned firms, significantly.

This study was conducted to measure the level of economic linkage in key economic zones in central Vietnam generally and to measure the level of economic linkage in the tourism sector. Secondary data were collected from the Statistical Yearbook published by the General Statistics Office and the Local Bureau of Statistics and primary data collected from surveys of 102 hotels and tourism firms in the center of Vietnam. We used the Moran Index (I) to quantify overall economic aggregation across the region and that scoring method was used to measure the degree of linkage in regional tourism. The results show that the level of overall regional economic linkages was very low and this was also relevant when analyzing the tourism sector in some areas of the center of Vietnam. Based on the results, some recommendations are given for strengthening economic linkages in key economic regions of Vietnam.

Culture is a powerful tool to communicate values and promote objectives of public interest that are broader than wealth creation. The economy of culture entails both cultural and creative sectors. The contribution of the culture to the economy has gradually been acknowledged, with the development of the cultural industries. Using the input output table methods, this research presents one way of measuring the economy of culture focusing on the impact of final consumptions of culture industry’s output on the growth of value added (GDP). Also, this study employs forward and backward linkage indicators of cultural industry that reveals the relationship between the cultural industry and other sectors in the economy. With the data from 2007, 2012 and 2016 input – output tables, the results show that although the contribution of cultural product consumption to the GDP is less than other sectors, the contribution of the cultural consumption to economic growth is quite high. The power of dispersion index of cultural industry in both 2012 and 2016 is quite high and nearly equal to 1, meaning that a unit of cultural industry change will lead to one unit of change in other industries, thus in turn leads to double the number of changes in value added of the whole economy.