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

Profitability and marketability efficiencies of manufacturers in the association of Southeast Asian Nations: A multi-stage empirical study : A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Lincoln University

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is developing as an attractive, promising destination for manufacturing operations in Asia. Since the 2015 establishment of ASEAN Economic Community, which aims to become a resilient manufacturing and business centre, it has fostered the growth of manufacturers in ASEAN. The manufacturing sector has contributed extensively to the economic development of ASEAN nations. Notable recent positive statistics report the impressive performance and continuous development of manufacturing in most ASEAN countries. Despite the acknowledged contribution and potential growth of manufacturing in ASEAN nations, the profit-generating and market-value efficiencies of manufacturing enterprises in ASEAN are still debatable. This study applies the bootstrap two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) to investigate the profitability and marketability efficiencies of 899 listed manufacturers in six selected ASEAN countries (ASEAN-6): Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam from 2007 to 2018. The study uses panel-data fractional and Tobit regression models to examine the effects of corporate factors on the listed manufacturers’ profitability and marketability efficiencies across the ASEAN-6 countries. Though the fractional regression model is the most advantageous method for fractional response variables, the Tobit regression model is most widely used for evaluating efficiency determinants. The bootstrap two-stage DEA results show that Indonesian and Singaporean listed manufacturing attains relatively high average profitability efficiency. Conversely, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam listed manufacturers’ profitability efficiency has considerable room for improvement. Marketability efficiency levels are significantly lower than profitability efficiency for most ASEAN-6 countries (exception, Malaysia). Singaporean listed manufacturers have the highest marketability efficiency scores, followed by Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam listed manufacturers. The empirical results from the regression models show diverse, significant impacts of corporate financial and non-financial factors on the profitability and marketability efficiencies of the listed firms in the ASEAN-6 countries’ manufacturing sector and sub-sectors (high-technology and traditional production sub-sectors)

MPC-based Management of Energy Resources in Smart Microgrids

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The interrelationships among the formal, semiformal and informal credit demands of farm households in Vietnam

Purpose: This study simultaneously explores the nexus among formal, semiformal and informal credit markets and farm households' credit demand determinants in Vietnam. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a multistage stratified random sampling process for a survey of 648 smallholder farmers in the Red River Delta (RRD), Vietnam. The trivariate probit model (TVPM) is used to address the interdependence of farm households' credit demands in different credit markets. Findings: The results reveal complementary relationships among two pairs of credit markets (formal versus informal and semiformal versus informal). There are dissimilarities among the determinants (household characteristics, household head's characteristics, credit history and geographic factors) of farm households' credit demands in different markets, reflecting segmentation of Vietnam credit markets. Practical implications: The study's empirical findings are important for policymakers and credit providers to enhance farm households' access to credit for agriculture and to improve the operations of the three credit markets. Originality/value: This is the first empirical study in Vietnam and one of few in other developing countries simultaneously exploring the determinants of credit demand in and interrelationships among all three credit markets to provide more comprehensive and accurate results

Anti-DreamBooth: Protecting users from personalized text-to-image synthesis

Text-to-image diffusion models are nothing but a revolution, allowing anyone, even without design skills, to create realistic images from simple text inputs. With powerful personalization tools like DreamBooth, they can generate images of a specific person just by learning from his/her few reference images. However, when misused, such a powerful and convenient tool can produce fake news or disturbing content targeting any individual victim, posing a severe negative social impact. In this paper, we explore a defense system called Anti-DreamBooth against such malicious use of DreamBooth. The system aims to add subtle noise perturbation to each user's image before publishing in order to disrupt the generation quality of any DreamBooth model trained on these perturbed images. We investigate a wide range of algorithms for perturbation optimization and extensively evaluate them on two facial datasets over various text-to-image model versions. Despite the complicated formulation of DreamBooth and Diffusion-based text-to-image models, our methods effectively defend users from the malicious use of those models. Their effectiveness withstands even adverse conditions, such as model or prompt/term mismatching between training and testing. Our code will be available at \href{https://github.com/VinAIResearch/Anti-DreamBooth.git}{https://github.com/VinAIResearch/Anti-DreamBooth.git}.Comment: Project page: https://anti-dreambooth.github.io

Factors Influencing Intention to Use Social Insurance Application (VssID) in Vietnam Through Technology Acceptance Model

Technology is becoming more and more popular in public services in general and social insurance in particular in Vietnam. Although the social insurance software has been used since November 2020, the number of users is still limited so far. Therefore, this study aims at investigating determinants of the intention to use social insurance management applications of Vietnamese people. Applying a combination of three models (TAM, TRA and TPB), the study identifies five determinants of technology acceptance of users in their intention to use this application in Vietnam’s Social Insurance, including Perceived usefulness, Perceived ease of use, Subjective norm, Perceived behavioral control, and Attitude towards usage. Data for the study were collected through a survey in three big Vietnamese cities: Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang. Research results show that users' technology acceptance intention in social insurance in Vietnam is positively influenced by all five factors. From the analysis results, the study proposes recommendations related to improving the performance of the application, propagandizing the high applicability of VssID to the public. Policies and guidelines for the government to promote user's habit of using the application are also recommended. Keywords: Social insurance, intention to use, technology acceptance, VssID DOI: 10.7176/JESD/14-6-02 Publication date:March 31st 202