Global climate change and solutions for urban sustainability of Ho CHi Minh City, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the largest city in Vietnam, is steadily growing, certainly towards a mega city in the near future. Like other mega cities at the boom stage, it has to face with serious environmental matters insolvable for many years. The situation may be worse under the effects of global climate change, geological subsidence due to non-standard construction and sea level rise. The situation of HCMC can be damaged or even broken by resonant effects of unsolved environmental matters and latent impacts of climate change. This article shows the challenges to the urban sustainable development under the duo effect of urban environmental matters and climate change in Ho Chi Minh City. Opportunities and strategic directions to overcome the challenges are also analyzed and recommended

Intrinsic flat stability of the positive mass theorem for graphical hypersurfaces of Euclidean space

The rigidity of the Positive Mass Theorem states that the only complete asymptotically flat manifold of nonnegative scalar curvature and zero mass is Euclidean space. We study the stability of this statement for spaces that can be realized as graphical hypersurfaces in Euclidean space. We prove (under certain technical hypotheses) that if a sequence of complete asymptotically flat graphs of nonnegative scalar curvature has mass approaching zero, then the sequence must converge to Euclidean space in the pointed intrinsic flat sense. The appendix includes a new Gromov-Hausdorff and intrinsic flat compactness theorem for sequences of metric spaces with uniform Lipschitz bounds on their metrics.Comment: 31 pages, 2 figures, v2: to appear in Crelle's Journal, many minor changes, one new exampl

Financial Liberalization, Economic Growth and Investment Strategy: Lessons from Taiwan for New Industrial Countries

To examine the impact of foreign capital inflows on Taiwan’s economy after internet bubbles of 2000, this study adopts data from the first quarter of 2001 to the second quarter 2015 to test if foreign capital inflows have positive impacts on Taiwan’s economic growth. This study also uses program trading and aims to prove that with financial liberalizations, the investment efficiency of foreign institutional investors is better than domestic institutional investors. The results from the error correction model shows that capital formation, domestic savings and foreign direct investment all have positive relationships with the real economic growth. However, the rate of financing and foreign debt and depreciation all have negative relationships with the real economic growth. The results are all statistically significant. Hence, they do not completely support the hypothesis that foreign capital inflows are beneficial for economic growth. Moreover, this study proves that the futures market in Taiwan is not strong-form market efficient. This result provides support for the hypothesis that the investment efficiency of foreign institutional investors is higher than that of domestic institutional investors. Investors can therefore raise their investment performance by following the investment strategies of foreign institutional investors.

Why are the Performances of Business Groups Different? A Case Study of Formosa Plastics Group and Far Eastern Group

This study examines the difference in performances of two business groups, Formosa Plastics Group and Far Eastern Group, under the impact of financial tsunami (2007.10.29~2017.8.10). The aim of this study is to help investors understand the operating model of business groups and use the herding effect to enhance the trading performance in financial markets. The empirical evidence shows that for the Formosa Plastics Group, the news impact curve (based on EGARCH model) including the leading company is flatter when the news impact is less than zero (that is, negative news impact) than the news impact curve excluding the leading company. In contrast, the news impact curve of the Far Eastern Group is steeper when the leading company is included. Moreover, when the leading company is included as an endogeneous variable in the model as a filter for the program trading simulation, results show that investors can profit from the Formosa Plastics Group. Therefore, business groups that include the leading company have lower risks. It is beneficial to the stability of the market trading by incorporating the leverage effect of the leading company in business groups. On the contrary, the leading company of the Far Eastern Group does not have such an effect. The absolute profits and the increment of performance are both lower than that of the Formosa Plastics Group. The results suggest that the diversification strategy of Far Eastern Group is worse than the vertical integration strategy of the Formosa Plastics Group. The implication is that investors should carefully choose the business group for investment if they are to utilize the herding effect in investment

How to Invest in Stocks of Family Business Groups? Case Study of WALSIN Group in Taiwan

The impact of family business groups on the industry has drawn different views. A major challenge for investors is to understand the business model of enterprises and enhance the trading performance in the financial market. Using the data of WALSIN family group, this article adopts generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model (EGARCH) to investigate the volatility of stock prices of WALSIN family group. The overall evidence suggests that the relationship between the leverage effect after including the leading company variable and the absence of the leading company appears to be significant at the 1% level. Therefore, the leverage effect after including the leading company has a certain effect on the financial operation of the family business group. In other words, it is helpful to include the leverage effect of the leading company in the portfolio, which can stabilize the trading performance of the WALSIN family group.Furthermore, this study adopts Granger causality and program trading to test the strategy of following the leader of WALSIN family group. The net trading profit during this period is 71.03%. The results show that the technical analysis tested in this study can lead to trading profits and investors can increase their trading profits by following the leader in the family owned business

Limitations of cyclic pile load tests by kentledge system in soft clay soil

The paper describes the inadequacies of cycled head-down load tests on two barrettes and one bored pile installed in soft clay soil region in Binh Thanh district, and district 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, respectively. The soil profile of these sites consisted of layers of organic soft clay and silt from 22.5 m to 28.6 m depth on compact silty sand or semi-stiff to stiff clays to about 60 m depth and followed by dense to very dense sand. The cross-section area of two barrettes located on the Tan Cang complex area was 2,800 mm by 800 mm, which were constructed using the bucket drill technique with bentonite slurry into 65 m depth.  The bored pile of the Lakeside project in district 7 having a pile diameter was 1200 mm and 80 m depth. All instrumented piles were attached from ten to eleven strain gages levels along the pile shaft to record the deformation data during the load tests. The strain data analysis shows that the shaft frictions of pile portions located in the soft clay soil regions were increased dramatically, and the base resistances were smaller expected by the setting-up of Kentledge and the cyclic loading tests