Do Corporate Social Responsibilities Support Its Financial Performance? Evidence of the Listed Firms in Vietnam

In the latest decades, corporate social responsibilities (CSR) are incrementally noticed in emerging countries regarding to the surge of globalization and the advance of social concerns. However, there exist opposing arguments on how CSR practices influence a firm’s financial performance (CFP), either in theoretical or empirical perspectives, causing many managers’ hesitation in CSR engagement. This study, therefore, examines the impacts of CSR on CFP, considering the individual effect of each CSR endeavor by using the data from listed firms’ financial statements during the period 2015-2019 and panel regression analysis methods. The findings reveal inconstant effects of different CSR activities on CFP. Specifically, a firm’s fulfillment of shareholders’ and customers’ interests contributes to raise its profitability, while its engagement in the benefits of employees and creditors causes a reduction in financial returns. Interestingly, the correlations between firms’ responsibilies towards regulators and suppliers and CFP are statistically insignificant. Furthermore, we make pairwise marginal comparisons to identify the distinctions of CSR-CFP relations across industries. The results only indicate that listed firms in Utilities sector have the lower level of CSR intensity than those in Consumer Discretionary and Consumer Staples sectors. The implications and limitations are also discussed in this study

Research on Urban Land Use Change in Ha Noi, Viet Nam Using Remote Sensing and GIS for Planning Oriented Work

Currently, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, this proportion is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. In the next 30 years, a large amount of the world's population is predictably concentrated in urban areas in the developing world. Ha Noi is the capital and largest city of Viet Nam which has the average growth rate of approximately 3% per year. Urban development management has become an important issue in Viet Nam since the negative impacts of the urban sprawl on the environmental sustainability, life quality has been increasing as well. Hence, urban planning and management would be pivotal for creating the effective framework conditions for a sustainable development. The objective of our study is to explore the urban growth of Ha Noi using the Landsat images from 1975 to 2020 compared to the city planning. The volatility analysis information from classified urban land maps is considered supportive for urban management and planning oriented work. In addition, the remote sensing data analysis is a useful tool to support planners, managers for urban management and decision. This study results showed the urban land area in study site city has been growing about 3 times and the largest rate (4-6 times) for the Dong Anh, Tu Liem, Gia Lam and smallest rate (10-25%) for Ba Dinh and Hai Ba Trung districts

DART: Distribution Aware Retinal Transform for Event-based Cameras

We introduce a generic visual descriptor, termed as distribution aware retinal transform (DART), that encodes the structural context using log-polar grids for event cameras. The DART descriptor is applied to four different problems, namely object classification, tracking, detection and feature matching: (1) The DART features are directly employed as local descriptors in a bag-of-features classification framework and testing is carried out on four standard event-based object datasets (N-MNIST, MNIST-DVS, CIFAR10-DVS, NCaltech-101). (2) Extending the classification system, tracking is demonstrated using two key novelties: (i) For overcoming the low-sample problem for the one-shot learning of a binary classifier, statistical bootstrapping is leveraged with online learning; (ii) To achieve tracker robustness, the scale and rotation equivariance property of the DART descriptors is exploited for the one-shot learning. (3) To solve the long-term object tracking problem, an object detector is designed using the principle of cluster majority voting. The detection scheme is then combined with the tracker to result in a high intersection-over-union score with augmented ground truth annotations on the publicly available event camera dataset. (4) Finally, the event context encoded by DART greatly simplifies the feature correspondence problem, especially for spatio-temporal slices far apart in time, which has not been explicitly tackled in the event-based vision domain.Comment: 12 pages, revision submitted to TPAMI in Nov 201

China's Angel Investment Policy

Purpose: This paper summarized and systematized the case of China's policies applied to attract angel investment which turned this country into a global highlight in angel investment.   Theoretical framework: The authors conducted a literature review on start-up and angel investment to introduce angel investment in China, analyze the role of angel investments in developing start-ups, and factor determinants and policy of angel investment in China.   Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper uses qualitative method to provide overviews on the case of China in attracting angel investment for their start-ups with an updated analysis on their relevant factor determinants and policies that contributed to the success of China.   Findings: It is found that the Chinese Government has actively carried out packages, including tax incentives, built programs, investment cooperation funds, developed networks, and angel investment education systems to boost funding readiness for firms. They also focus on promoting the start-up ecosystem and providing financial support to implement an innovation-driven development strategy to raise the nation's competitiveness.   Research, practical & social implications: This paper provides some suggestions for Chinese government in making policies to enhance the role of angel investments in developing start-ups.   Originality/Value: This paper contributes to the evolvement of research about start- up and angel investment, particularly in China, in the context of high-tech  production and breakthrough technologies, by providing a policy perspective to imply lessons for other countries

Para-Social Interaction and Trust in Live-Streaming Sellers

Live streaming is one of the modern methods that allows sellers to create, transmit, or broadcast some content on the internet in real-time, and it has been used by many small individual merchants. Understanding how live streaming contributes to online consumption is becoming increasingly important in social commerce as the live-streaming industry has grown more and more popular. However, the number of studies on live streaming is still quite limited in Vietnam. Therefore, this research will look at the mechanism that enables live streaming to boost customer trust in streamers. Using PLS-SEM on a sample of 360 respondents who viewed selling live streams on social network sites in Vietnam, we discovered that other members' endorsement, value similarity, hedonic value, and utilitarian value contribute to good para-social interaction. Next, utilitarian and hedonic values, streamer product expertise, and para-social interaction all positively affect trust in the streamers. The findings could help live-streaming sellers better understand their social interactions with viewers, resulting in increased customer trust. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-03-06 Full Text: PD

Habenaria diphylla (Nimmo) Dalzell (Orchidaceae), new record for the flora of Vietnam

Habenaria diphylla (Nimmo) Dalzell is reported for the first time as a new discovery for the flora of Vietnam based on the specimens collected in Binh Chau-Phuoc Buu Nature Reserve, Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province. The present study provided the detailed characteristics of the species including detailed photographs of the morphological characteristics, the cross section of the leaf, inflorescence axis and root. Furthermore, the information about the species, including distribution, habitat, ecology and conservation status were also provided

THE IMPACT OF INNOVATION ON ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE SPILLOVER EFFECT OF FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT

Purpose of the study: Innovation is seen as the key to improving quality and productivity, thereby promoting competition and economic growth. This study analyzes the impact of innovation on economic growth through various measures, such as research and development spending, the number of researchers, number of patents as well as trademark registrations. Research results are evidence to recommend policies for intellectual-based economic growth. Methodology: Literature review and empirical analysis conducted in the study. The empirical method is a two-step System Generalize Methods of Moments (GMM), aiming at reliable results. Accessing the World Bank Database, research data from 64 developed and developing countries are collected from 2006 to 2014. Main Findings: The empirical findings show that innovation plays a crucial contribution in promoting economic growth, similar to national openness and government spending on education. This study also finds a positive impact on foreign investment flows and their spillover role in enhancing the correlation between innovation and economic growth. Applications of this study: The findings of this study focus on the contributions of innovation, foreign direct investment inflows, and other macro factors that can be enforced to improve economic growth by policymakers. Novelty/Originality of this study: The study uses different measures of innovation, including inputs such as the number of researchers, research and development expenditure, and outputs as the number of patents and number of trademark registrations. Empirical findings are found consistently, thus confirming that innovation is very important for economic growth. The study also shows convincing evidence confirming the positive contribution of foreign direct investment as well as its spillover effect on innovation and economic growth

Physiochemical properties, antibacterial and antioxidant activities of Terminalia catappa seed oils from two extracting processes

Terminalia catappa is a widespread medium tree species in many tropical countries. While the majority of the studies up to date focuses on the aerial part of the plant such as leaf, stem bark and fruit, information about the phytochemical property as well as the biological property of the edible seed is still scarce. This study was the first to explore the fatty acid composition, antibacterial and antioxidant activities of the seed oil from T. catappa grown in Vietnam. The results showed that both the hot-pressed and cold-pressed oils contained a high level of unsaturated fatty acids such as oleic (~32%) and linoleic acids (28.38%-29.2%), as well as saturated fatty acids such as palmitic acid (~33.3%-33.61%). The presence of eicosadienoic acid in T. catappa seed oils was reported in this study for the first time. These oils displayed antibacterial activity against 5 out of 12 tested strains such as Bacillus cereus, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Vibrio parahaemolyticus. The antioxidant activity of the oils was also recorded by DPPH radical scavenging assays with IC50 values of 950 µg/ml and 2529 µg/ml for cold-pressed oil and hot-pressed oil respectively. This study has provided promising extracting methods and resulted in oils that could be good candidates for developing food sources with valuable fatty acids, antioxidant and antibacterial capacities against both Gram-positive and negative bacteria in the human diet