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The primary purpose of this study is to explore the effect of technical changes on provincial-level income inequality in Vietnam. The authors also investigate whether the quality of institutions and human capital level moderate this relationship.

This research applies the fixed-effect and random-effect models on a balanced panel data set of 63 Vietnamese provinces/cities from 2010 to 2020.

The study’s empirical results show that technical improvement has a nonlinear influence on income disparity in Vietnamese localities. When the local level of technology is limited, technological change can mitigate income disparity. However, as local technological levels increase, inequality tends to rise. Moreover, the study also reveals that the quality of a province’s institutions and the level of human resources are factors that moderate the correlation between technological change and income inequality. For provinces with better institutional quality and/or better human resources, inequality tends to decline under the impact of technological change.

The results of this study suggest that while encouraging technology advancement, localities should also ensure sustainable development, reduce income inequality and focus on improving institutional quality and human resources development.

There are increasing concerns about the impact of technical change on inequality in income distribution; however, empirical evidence on this relationship in developing countries remains scarce. This study is among the few attempts to examine this issue at the provincial level of a developing country considering the moderation effect of institutional quality and human capital level.

This chapter focuses on the potential of urban agriculture to support progress in SDG targets 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4 in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. The chapter integrates findings from the British Council-funded project, ‘Urban Resilience from Agriculture through Highly Automated Vertical Farming in the UK and Vietnam’, undertaken in collaboration with Middlesex University, Van Lang University, and local agricultural stakeholders in HCMC. Food security in the city faces multiple challenges ranging from significant in-migration, decreasing area of cultivated land, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic that continues to depress the economy and disrupt food supply chains, and climate change impacts affecting the environment and people throughout the city. HCMC accommodates a substantial agricultural sector, which is evolving from traditional to modern production practices. City’s leaders established numerous policies that emphasise green, circular economies, climate change resilience, and low carbon emissions fuelling demand for agricultural solutions that integrate traditional and modern technologies that can be embedded in the local topography, soil types, architectural space, and native culture. Findings from greenhouse trials, community awareness surveys, and stakeholder-led workshops point to a range of high-technology-supported agriculture models that, if applied flexibly throughout the varying context of the urban area, have good scope to help Ho Chi Minh City and meet its growing need for food as well as its sustainability aspirations.