Determinants of foreign direct investment in Vietnam 1988-2009

This thesis analyses the determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in Vietnam from 1988-2009. It examines the nature, motivation and impact of FDI upon the Vietnam economy and its contribution to the subsequent leap forward in economic growth. The focus is on developing Dunning’s eclectic theory through case study analysis of Honda-Vietnam Motorbike Company and ANZ-Vietnam Bank. The prominent theories on FDI generally used in the thesis focus on Vernon’s Product Life Cycle (PLC) model, the Market Imperfection Theory (MIT), the Transaction Cost (TC) or internalisation approach and Dunning’s Eclectic Theory. Dunning is the clearest methodology for understanding the Vietnamese case as its method is to take account of a countries particular FDI characteristics and their impact on economic growth. The addition of an emphasis on the impact of culture upon the development of FDI in Vietnam provides this thesis with evidence of its originality and legitimacy to the claim of filling a gap in the literature on FDI in developing countries and the advancement of economic theory. The main focus in the case studies is demonstrating how foreign invested enterprises altered production, management, service and marketing processes to adapt their traditional, organisational and locational advantages to suit the local environment, and give them both foreign and domestic comparative advantages, ensuring the maximum possible capital return on their investments

The time to shut down

At each time, a firm facing uncertainty over future market conditions have to make a decision whether they should continue to produce or stop the process? As the traditional principle, the firm will go out of production when the price of the typical unit does not cover the average variable cost that it must incur to produce the typical unit. In reality the firm can suffer losses today however it can get more gains tomorrow that is enough to make up the losses. It means that this rule seems not be suitable absolutely in an uncertainty environment. And it leads to a rule that the firm only stop producing if average variable costs of unit exceed the price of unit by a positive amount. This paper expects to find this exceeding amount and when a firm will stop producing. Under uncertainty, the price of unit and the average variables cost are assumed to follow a continuous time stochastic process. We wish to apply the optimal stopping time approach in order to solve it.

Improving GAN with neighbors embedding and gradient matching

We propose two new techniques for training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Our objectives are to alleviate mode collapse in GAN and improve the quality of the generated samples. First, we propose neighbor embedding, a manifold learning-based regularization to explicitly retain local structures of latent samples in the generated samples. This prevents generator from producing nearly identical data samples from different latent samples, and reduces mode collapse. We propose an inverse t-SNE regularizer to achieve this. Second, we propose a new technique, gradient matching, to align the distributions of the generated samples and the real samples. As it is challenging to work with high-dimensional sample distributions, we propose to align these distributions through the scalar discriminator scores. We constrain the difference between the discriminator scores of the real samples and generated ones. We further constrain the difference between the gradients of these discriminator scores. We derive these constraints from Taylor approximations of the discriminator function. We perform experiments to demonstrate that our proposed techniques are computationally simple and easy to be incorporated in existing systems. When Gradient matching and Neighbour embedding are applied together, our GN-GAN achieves outstanding results on 1D/2D synthetic, CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets, e.g. FID score of $30.80$ for the STL-10 dataset. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tntrung/ganComment: Published as a conference paper at AAAI 201

Developing The Solar Tracking System for Trough Solar Concentrator

The efficiency of the trough solar concentrator strongly depends on the position of its absorber surface with the sun.  Controlling the solar radiation concentrated collectors automatically tracking with the sun plays as the key factor to enhance the energy absorption. An automatic controlling device that can rotating the parabolic trough solar concentrator to the sun is calculated, designed, manufactured, and testing successfully. The experimental results show that the device tracks the sun during the day very well. The sensor has adjusted position of collector good when the intensity of solar radiation changes due to weather

A monitoring and diagnostic approach for stochastic textured surfaces

We develop a supervised-learning-based approach for monitoring and diagnosing texture-related defects in manufactured products characterized by stochastic textured surfaces that satisfy the locality and stationarity properties of Markov random fields. Examples of stochastic textured surface data include images of woven textiles; image or surface metrology data for machined, cast, or formed metal parts; microscopy images of material microstructure samples; etc. To characterize the complex spatial statistical dependencies of in-control samples of the stochastic textured surface, we use rather generic supervised learning methods, which provide an implicit characterization of the joint distribution of the surface texture. We propose two spatial moving statistics, which are computed from residual errors of the fitted supervised learning model, for monitoring and diagnosing local aberrations in the general spatial statistical behavior of newly manufactured stochastic textured surface samples in a statistical process control context. We illustrate the approach using images of textile fabric samples and simulated 2-D stochastic processes, for which the algorithm successfully detects local defects of various natures. Supplemental discussions, results, data and computer codes are available online

Is Nonfarm Diversification a Way Out of Poverty for Rural Households? Evidence from Vietnam in 1993-2006

school. Using the four high quality household living standards surveys available to date this paper reveals that Vietnam’s rural labour force has been markedly diversifying toward nonfarm activities in the doi moi (renovation) reform period. The employment share of the rural nonfarm sector has increased from 23 percent to 58 percent between the years 1993 and 2006. At the individual level, the results indicate that participation in the rural nonfarm sector is determined by a set of individual-, household-, and community-level characteristics. Gender, ethnicity, and education are reported as main individual-level drivers of nonfarm diversification. Lands as most important physical assets of rural households are found to be negative to nonfarm employment. It is also evident that both physical and institutional infrastructure exert important influences on individual participation in the nonfarm sector. At the household level, a combination of parametric and semi-parametric analysis is adopted to examine whether nonfarm diversification is a poverty exit path for rural households. This paper demonstrates a positive effect of nonfarm diversification on household welfare and this effect is robust to different estimation techniques, measures of nonfarm diversification, and the usage of equivalent scales. However, the poor is reported to benefit less than the non-poor from nonfarm activities. Though promoting a buoyant nonfarm sector is crucial for rural development and poverty reduction, it needs to be associated with enhancing access to nonfarm opportunities for the poor.Rural nonfarm sector, nonfarm diversification, household welfare, Vietnam

Bank Credit, Trade Credit, and Profit: Evidence from Agricultural Firms in Vietnam

This paper investigates the relationships between bank credit and trade credit with profit of 130 agricultural firms listed on Vietnam’s stock exchanges in the period of 2008-2014. Using the GMM approach, the paper reveals inverted-U shaped (?) relationships between bank credit and trade credit with profit. Specifically, the optimal threshold of bank credit and trade credit to total assets of the firms are 0.4173 and 0.2425, respectively. The findings mean that if the ratio of bank credit to total assets exceeds the benchmark of 0.4173, firms should consider restructuring debts to get them back to the benchmark. To do so, firms should withdraw from those business fields that are not of profession, in addition to liquiditizing unused assets to repay debts and not using short-term credit to invest in long-term projects. Firms may use of trade credit wisely when other sources of finance are lacking. In concrete, firms can increase trade credit use if the ratio of trade credit to total assets is below 0.2425. Yet, if this ratio goes beyond this benchmark, firms should get its back to this benchmark, e.g., keeping a suitable amount of inventory

The mod 2 cohomology rings of congruence subgroups in the Bianchi groups

We provide new tools for the calculation of the torsion in the cohomology of congruence subgroups in the Bianchi groups : An algorithm for finding particularly useful fundamental domains, and an analysis of the equivariant spectral sequence combined with torsion subcomplex reduction.\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_With an appendix by Bui Anh Tuan and Sebastian Sch{\"o}nnenbec