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This study investigates the impact of the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) on Vietnam’s labor market and employment outcomes, considering the potential distributional consequences across various groups of workers and regions.

A comprehensive quantitative framework is employed, combining the gravity model of trade to estimate the EVFTA’s effects on trade flows, the CISAF_M1 model to simulate sectoral employment impacts and econometric models to analyze the effects on wages and decent work. The analysis draws upon a rich dataset spanning the period before and after the EVFTA’s implementation.

The EVFTA has significantly boosted Vietnam’s exports to the EU, leading to substantial job creation in labor-intensive sectors such as textiles, apparel and footwear. The agreement has also contributed to wage growth and improved access to social insurance for workers in export-oriented industries. However, the impact on other aspects of job quality is less clear. The distributional analysis reveals that the EVFTA’s employment effects have been relatively balanced across gender but have favored younger and less skilled workers as well as those in rural areas.

This study provides a comprehensive and nuanced assessment of the EVFTA’s impact on Vietnam’s labor market, addressing a gap in the literature on the employment effects of new-generation free trade agreements in developing countries. The findings highlight the importance of considering distributional aspects when evaluating the socioeconomic implications of trade liberalization and offer valuable insights for policymakers aiming to promote inclusive growth in the context of deepening international economic integration.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-03-2024-0236

This research identifies the level of labor misallocation in Vietnamese manufacturing sector for the period 2005–2019. The paper also examines the effects of labor misallocation on productivity in Vietnamese manufacturing firms controlled by industry- and firm-level factors.

The level of labor misallocation and efficiency gains in total factor productivity (TFP) are assessed using Vietnam's annual enterprise survey data for the period 2005–2019 and Hsieh and Klenow (2009) productivity decomposition framework.

The results indicate four main points. Firstly, labor misallocation tends to increase from 2005 to 2019. Secondly, labor misallocation by firm ownership and technology level is found to be highest in state-owned enterprise and low-tech industries, whereas foreign direct investment and high-tech firms have lowest labor misallocation. Labor misallocation in small- and medium-sized enterprises is higher than in large-sized enterprises and is equivalent to overall sample. Thirdly, labor misallocation decreases productivity in manufacturing firms. The firm-level factors such as bigger technology gap, external capital, firm scale and poor liquidity ratio decrease productivity in manufacturing firms. Whereas firm-level factors such as Vietnam's accession to the WTO, reasonable corporate tax structure, capital intensity, human capital and firm age increase productivity of manufacturing firms. The industry-level factors such as FDI horizontal, forward and supply backward spillovers promote productivity from foreign firms to domestic ones. Meanwhile, only backward linkages reduce productivity of firms. Finally, by difference-in-differences (DID) method, the result indicates foreign firms have higher average labor productivity than domestic firms before or after Vietnam's accession to the WTO. After joining WTO, the average labor productivity of foreign firms is increased by 854 million VND while the average labor productivity of domestic firms is increased by 895 million VND. The DID between the two groups (domestic firms and foreign firms) before and after Vietnam's accession to WTO is 41 million dong.

The main limitation of the study is that the market is assumed perfectly competitive. The model focuses on selective factors affecting labor productivity.

The focus of many previous international research papers was generally to look at the level of labor misallocation in developed countries. However, knowledge about labor misallocation is limited, particularly in the context of developing countries. This paper examines the level of labor misallocation by region, ownership, level of technology and firm size on productivity and the effect of misallocation on productivity in Vietnamese manufacturing firms.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2021-0552.

“The world needs science, science needs women” is the message given by UNESCO in the program for the development of women in science” (UNESCO, 2017). In Vietnam, women’s participation and achievements in scientific research is considered a great and important resource for industrialization and modernization. Even so, are there gender differences in scientific achievement in the social science research institutes in Vietnam? What factors influence the scientific achievement of female social researchers? The answers will be based on data from a 2017 survey with a sample of 756 researchers, of which 77.6% were female. The survey was conducted by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, a leading, ministry-level national center for the social sciences in Vietnam. This chapter analyzed the scientific achievements of researchers through their position as principal investigators of research projects and their publications, and factors that may impact this. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of factors that may affect the scientific achievement of researchers found that gender differences in academic achievement in the social sciences in Vietnam was still prevalent. Female researchers’ scientific achievements were lower than those of their male counterparts. The contribution to science of Vietnamese female researchers was limited by many different factors; the most important were the academic rank of the researchers and gender stereotype that considered housework the responsibility of women.

This research examines how bank competition and corporate social responsibility (CSR) affect the stability of Vietnamese commercial banks.

Utilizing data collected from 24 commercial banks spanning the period from 2015 to 2022, the paper employs the two-step system generalized method of moments (SGMM) regression method to find the impact of competition and CSR on commercial banks’ stability in Vietnam.

The key findings are (1) increased competition boosts commercial bank stability; (2) economic and environmental CSR initiatives adversely affect bank stability, while social CSR has a positive impact; (3) seven other factors are also identified to enhance bank stability, including bank size, cost management efficiency, independent management, inflation, gross domestic product (GDP) growth, monetary policy and volatility time.

Prior studies have not concurrently incorporated both CSR and bank competition in their investigations of bank financial stability. Specifically, the comprehensive components of CSR remain underexplored, with a predominant focus on its environmental dimension. This research stands out as one of the few endeavors scrutinizing the influence of competition and CSR on commercial bank financial stability in Vietnam, with a detailed investigation of all three components of CSR.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2024-0316

This paper aims to explore green technology (GT) transfer through the perceptions of both business managers and technology specialists, who have been identified as the foremost practitioners of this practice.

A total of 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted with business leaders and technology scientists. The interviewees were asked to share their views on the motivations for importing GT; their familiarity with, knowledge of and understanding of GT transfer and the current GT performance in their organization; the key strengths of GT transfer and its limitations; the barriers to the use of GT; and their usefulness. The theoretical framework of actors’ resistance to institutional demands of Oliver (1991) is used as a theoretical lens to investigate the perceptions of the interviewees.

This study suggests that despite some benefits of the adoption of GT, such as increasing competitive advantage and improving green operations, there are huge concerns over the use and importation of GT. More specifically, almost all the technicians were concerned about the technical risks resulting from the lack of operational tests, the old technologies and the lack of knowledge transfer. Meanwhile, the paucity of specific regulations, guidance and environmental standards has been reported by business managers as one of the primary constraints for this movement.

This research contributes to the emerging literature on GT transfers in the developing world. It proves that the lack of communication and the scarcity of a true champion for GT efforts have reduced the efficiency of GT transfer.

By shedding light on the intricate nature of the relationships arising from GT adoption in organizations, this paper aims to support business leaders and standard setters in making a decision regarding the implementation and promotion of GT transfer, especially in the context of developing countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to explore eco-friendly technology transfers in a developing country from the micro-level perspective of both business and technology practitioners of GT-recipient organizations.

This study aims to analyze the effects of e-government on corruption prevalence by using a sample of 29 European countries over the period 2012–2019.

This paper uses the panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) model to mitigate the problems of cross-sectional dependence. The PCSE model is also considered to reexamine the findings when the presence of heteroscedasticity, fixed effects and endogeneity issues are taken into account. The theoretical model incorporates one-year-lagged explanatory variables to deal with endogeneity. The autoregressive distributed lag method using the dynamic fixed effects estimator is chosen to deal with the time and country-fixed effects in the effort to measure the short- and long-run effects of e-government more precisely.

The results indicate that e-government plays a critical role in improving the population’s perception of corruption. Furthermore, e-government appears to have an effect in the short run. Notably, the estimation results show that there is a nonlinear relationship between e-government, especially user centricity and key enablers and the corruption perception index in the U-shaped curve.

The short-run and nonlinear effects of e-government on corruption prevalence suggest that the fight against corruption requires countries to pursue a consistent and continuous improvement and development of the e-government system.

The authors contribute to the literature by providing a consistent and precise answer to this relationship in the case of European countries. Another contribution of the work is to use diverse indicators to reflect e-government in a typical country, which helps us confirm the reliability and robustness of the findings.

On the basis of the conservation of resources theory (CORT), this study investigates the relationship between social overload and users’ withdrawal intention from social communities on social networking sites (SNSs), with the serial mediating mechanisms of social-psychological distance and emotional exhaustion and the moderating mechanism of (similar) linguistic style.

Data were collected from 489 users in different social communities on SNSs in an emerging market. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the sample data and test the hypotheses.

Results show that social overload has a positive influence on withdrawal intention from social communities on SNSs. Furthermore, social-psychological distance and emotional exhaustion have a serial mediating effect in this relationship. In addition, (similar) linguistic style negatively moderates the link between social overload and emotional exhaustion and that between social overload and withdrawal intention.

This study extends CORT to propose and test a unique research model that clarifies the mechanisms leading to users’ withdrawal behavior from social communities on SNSs. The findings of this study provide implications for researchers, individual users, administrators/managers of social communities, and SNS providers to understand and make better decisions to retain member users.

The purpose of this paper is to map the “migration pathways” (King and Skeldon, 2010) followed by interviews with a group of Vietnamese international labour migrants.

Through 50 in-depth interviews, the authors identify the reasons that explain the pathways observed.

The authors found that more than half of the interviewees did what King and Skeldon describe as a U-turn, whereby the migrants go abroad for work directly from their home town and return to settle there. The remainder did a J-turn, meaning the migrants returned and settled elsewhere. The majority of those doing a J-turn moved to another town/city within the province of their home town. Few return migrants settled outside their home province. The main explanations for the U-turn choice include existing investment in immobile assets in their home town, strong family ties, parental care obligations, lack of skill acquisition from international labour migration, age and for married migrants having children. Poor conditions in their home town, the absence of local job opportunities and better schooling for children were important considerations that made the J-turn more desirable. Having family ties in a new location, and affording the investment needed to settle in a new town, were important explanations to make the J-turn possible.

This paper highlights the need for economic development in rural Vietnam, including the creation of decentralised and sustainable livelihoods, so that return migrants have opportunities to reintegrate within their home communities.

In October 2020, Vietnam was repeatedly hit by large storms, including Linfa, Nangka, Saudel and Molave, causing heavy rains and whirlwinds in the Central provinces of Vietnam. The heavy rain led to severe flooding in many localities. The water levels on major rivers broke records of historical flood events in 1950, 1979, 1999, 2007, 2010 and 2016. In response, this paper aims to quantify the impacts of 2020 flooding to support flood risk management activities and the relief agencies that can use the analysis.

This study demonstrates an approach to quickly map flood impacts on population, schools, health-care facilities, agriculture, transportation and business facilities and assess flood risks using available data and spatial analysis techniques.

The results show that all districts of Quang Binh were affected by the event, in which 1,014 residential areas, 70 schools, 13 health-care facilities, 32,558 ha of agriculture lands, 402 km road length, 29 km railway, 35 bridges on roads and 239 business facilities were exposed within flooded areas.

This study is limited to direct or tangible impacts, including flooded residential areas, schools, health-care facilities, agriculture land categories, road networks and business facilities. Indirect or intangible impacts such as health, flood pollution and business disruption should be considered in further studies.

These detailed impact maps can support decision-makers and local authorities in implementing recovery activities, allocating relief and devoting human resources and developing flood risk management action plans and land-use planning in the future.

This study investigates the context of flood impacts on population, schools, health-care facilities, agriculture, transportation and business facilities. Based on this research, decision-makers can better understand how to support affected communities and target the most at risk people with interventions.

This paper presents a framework to quantify the impacts of the 2020 extreme flood event using available data and spatial analysis techniques in support of flood risk management activities.

This study investigates the role of social media brand posts on customer response and whether said impacts foster engagement in brand co-creation behaviors, especially in the higher education sector. The study further explores the moderating role of a university's reputation in strengthening the effects on student response and co-creation behaviors.

The authors conducted this research by using the dual processes of the heuristic–systematic model to understand the effects of brand post‐characteristics on student’s responses and behaviors. A dataset obtained from a survey of 755 students was employed to estimate the proposed research model.

The results illustrated two key characteristics of brand posts, namely argument quality (systematic processing) and quantity of posts (heuristic processing), positively affect cognitive and affective responses, thus encouraging students to co-create value for a university brand. Moreover, our study also found that university reputation plays a significant moderating role in strengthening the relationship between recipients’ responses and co-creation behavior.

Online brand posts not only enable institutions to exchange brand information but also allow students to contribute their own resources to co-create brand value. Thus, the study findings can help brand managers successfully implement co-branding efforts and foster students in the co-creation process.