Firm exporting and employee benefits: first evidence from Vietnam manufacturing SMEs

This study examines linkages between the export participation of firms and employee benefits in terms of wages and employment quality. Based on a uniquely matched firmworker panel dataset for 2007 and 2009, we find evidence that export participation by firms in Vietnam has a positive impact on wages when taking into account firm characteristics alone. However, the exporter wage premium falls when both firm and worker characteristics are controlled for, and it decreases further when controlling for time-invariant unobservable factors by spell fixed effect estimation. While there are many studies on the export wage premium, the role of export participation on the quality of employment remains largely unexplored. By using a firm-level balanced panel dataset for the same period, our results suggest that export participation has a negative effect on employment quality. Nevertheless, the impact of export participation on both wages and employment quality vary greatly with respect to levels of technology

IN VIVO STUDY ON ETHANOLIC EXTRACT OF ALLIUM CEPA ON MICE TO EVALUATE THE ANTI-HYPERGLYCEMIC ACTIVITY

As diabetes and blood glucose concerns have been raising, other feasible treatments are now being conducted beside the conventional ones. There has been a shift to the consumption of naturally-derived medicines instead of chemically-derived ones due to novel tendency in medical treatment application. Allium cepa (A. Cepa), a familiar herb used in daily life as a spicy in cooking, was found to have anti-hyperglycemic activity. Extraction using various concentration of ethanol was done to assess the efficiency in total extraction. The 0o ethanol solvent (distilled water) was observed to give the highest efficiency in crude extraction. Total flavonoid and total phenolic content was measured. Although the efficiency in crude extraction of 96o ethanol is lower than those of other concentrations, it flavonoids-releasing and phenolics-releasing capacities are the greatest ones, which are 0.404 % and 11.129 % respectively. The IC50 values of 70o 80o, and90o ethanolic extract are far higher than that of the control. Then, normoglycemic test and glucose tolerance test were conducted to evaluate the anti-hyperglycemic effect of the A. cepa ’s extract. While the normoglycemic test came up with no significant changes on blood glucose levels of the normoglycemic mice, the glucose tolerance test pointed out the extract’s dosage of 4 mg/kg b.w could considerably reduce blood glucose level of oral-glucose-loading mice compared to negative control administering saline water and positive control administering Metformin and Amaryl. Eventually, since the study partially confirmed the anti-hyperglycemic activity of A. cepa ’s extract, further investigations are recommended

Optimizing I/O performance for high performance computing applications: from auto-tuning to a feedback-driven approach

The 2014 TOP500 supercomputer list includes over 40 deployed petascale systems, and the high performance computing (HPC) community is working toward developing the first exaflop system by 2023. Scientific applications on such large-scale computers often read and write a lot of data. With such rapid growth in computing power and data intensity, I/O continues to be a challenging factor in determining the overall performance of HPC applications. We address the problem of optimizing I/O performance for HPC applications by firstly examining the I/O behavior of thousands of supercomputing applications. We analyzed the high-level I/O logs of over a million jobs representing a combined total of six years of I/O behavior across three leading high-performance computing platforms. Our analysis provides a broad portrait of the state of HPC I/O usage. We proposed a simple and effective analysis and visualization procedure to help scientists who do not have I/O expertise to quickly locate the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their I/O approach. We proposed several filtering criteria for system administrators to find application candidates that are consuming system I/O resources inefficiently. Overall, our analysis techniques can help both application users and platform administrators improve I/O performance and I/O system utilization. In the second part, we develop a framework that can hide the complexity of the I/O stack from scientists without penalizing performance. This framework will allow application developers to issue I/O calls without modification and rely on an intelligent runtime system to transparently determine and execute an I/O strategy that takes all the levels of the I/O stack into account. Lastly, we develop a multi-level tracing framework that provides a much more detailed feedback for application’s I/O runtime behavior. These details are needed for in-depth application’s performance analysis and tuning

Factors Affecting Business Angels Investment in Vietnam

The paper aims at investigating and comparing the factors determining investment decisions by business angels (BAs) from the viewpoints of BAs and startups in Vietnam based on a framework synthesized from a literature review and primary data from in-depth interviews conducted with 8 startups and 15 angel investors. The results show that the startups’ founder, working team, financial issues, product and market, and strategy related to exit and the roles of BAs are startup-related factors determining BAs’ investment in Vietnam. For BA-related factors, the BAs’ experience, investment objectives and preferences, and culture are key determinants. The novelty of the paper is to find out the gaps between the perspectives of BAs and startups, and the difference between Vietnamese and foreign BAs’ viewpoints. The finding is that BAs, more strictly than startups, assess their business plan, financial state, product, market, and targeted consumers. Startups neglect the exit strategy and role of BAs in invested startups. In addition, foreign and domestic BAs have different opinions on startups’ market scale, and expectation of profits and BAs’ roles in startups. The paper ends by providing some implications for Vietnamese startups to attract more angel investment, focusing on improving the quality of human resources, developing a profitable, honest, and realistic business plan, and setting up a long-run vision towards the global market. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-02-07 Full Text: PD

Religiosity and life satisfaction among old people: Evidence from a transitional country

Using data from the 2011 Vietnam National Aging Survey, we examined whether religion is associated with subjective well-being (i.e. happiness or life satisfaction) among old people in Vietnam. Our regression analysis provided the first evidence that some religious affiliations are negatively related to happiness. Buddhists and Caodaists are less happy than their non-religious counterparts, even after controlling for several household and individual attributes. However, this negative association does not hold for Christians. This finding is robust to the choice of key covariates and specification of econometric models. Our finding supports the hypothesis that religiosity tends to be linked with unhappiness in transitional countries because in these countries those who are religious often consist disproportionately of new, relatively unhappy recruits

Religiosity and life satisfaction among old people: Evidence from a transitional country

Using data from the 2011 Vietnam National Aging Survey, we examined whether religion is associated with subjective well-being (i.e. happiness or life satisfaction) among old people in Vietnam. Our regression analysis provided the first evidence that some religious affiliations are negatively related to happiness. Buddhists and Caodaists are less happy than their non-religious counterparts, even after controlling for several household and individual attributes. However, this negative association does not hold for Christians. This finding is robust to the choice of key covariates and specification of econometric models. Our finding supports the hypothesis that religiosity tends to be linked with unhappiness in transitional countries because in these countries those who are religious often consist disproportionately of new, relatively unhappy recruits

Hybrid Magnetic-Semiconductor Oxides Nanomaterial: Green Synthesis and Environmental Catalytic

Semiconductor oxide nanoparticles with various properties are used in applications such as photocatalysis, lithium-ion batteries, antimicrobial materials, magnetic and antibacterial materials, sensors, thermally conductive and anti-ferromagnetic films and photocatalysis. Coprecipitation, sol-gel, electrospray synthesis, laser ablation, hydrothermal and green synthesis methods have been developed for the synthesis of semiconductor oxide nanoparticles. The photocatalytic treatment method is environmentally friendly, thorough, and has high efficiency. Hybrid magnetic-Semiconductor oxide nanoparticles materials are aggregated. This results in the combination of the superparameters of the iron oxide nanosystem and the ability to rapidly adsorb pollutants and separate them from environmental water, solid. This is due to characteristic properties such as low superparameter, low toxicity, low electrical conductivity, and large specific surface area. In addition, biosynthesis has attracted attention because it takes advantage of nonhazardous, environmentally friendly biological systems like bacteria, fungi, leaves, vitamins, and yeast to synthesize metal oxide nanopartilces and combined with sonosumbers to increase the dispersion of the system, reduce the size of the catalytic particles, and reduce the reaction time

Conditions for establishing cross-border economic zones in the North of Vietnam

The formation and development of border economic zones (BEZ) and cross-border economic zones (CBEZ) is not only an opportunity for the border regions, but also an engine for developing the supply chain and the production network as a result of border connectivity. The paper focuses on analyzing the conditions for the CBEZ in the border areas in the North of Vietnam, including Cao Bang, Lao Cai, Lang Son and Quang Ninh. There is a big difference in readiness for the establishment of the CBEZ among the four studied sites. However, connectivity needs the most improvement on all the sites, which includes both infrastructure connectivity and policy harmonization

Factors affecting e-learning based cloud computing acceptance: an empirical study at Vietnamese universities

E-learning has been a trend of higher education. Accounting students need to know how to apply flexible learning methods as they are required to study and practise in a technological environment. Nevertheless, studies on e-learning based on cloud computing for accounting students in Vietnam are still limited. This study aims to find out factors affecting the behavioral intention, the direct influence of habits, the beneficiary motivation, and the favorable conditions for the acceptance of using e- learning based on cloud computing. By using data collected from a survey of 696 students and applying the theory of adopting extended UTAUT model, the estimation results from the linear structure models show that there are six determinants of accounting students’ behavioral intention, in which the performance expectancy has the strongest impact, followed by effort expectancy, price value, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, and social influence. Additionally, our findings suggest that despite not affecting the behavioral intention to use e-learning, habits directly impact the application. The hedonic motivation and the facilitating conditions are found to have direct and significant impacts on the use of e-learning based on cloud computing