COVID-19, lockdown and labor uncertainty

In this paper, we investigate the impact of containment and closure poli- cies amid the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market. We show that these effects depend on the presence of labor uncertainty. In the absence of labor uncertainty, the containment and closure policy resulted in people applying fewer self-protection measures, facing lower income and saving more. We predict that workers will lose their job as a consequence of this policy if and only if the containment elasticity of labor demand is sufficiently large. By contrast, when labor uncertainty is introduced, our model predicts more self-protection, more job loss and fewer savings as a result of a lockdown. In addition, income loss occurs if and only if the elasticity of labor demand is large enough. We test our predictions by employing new survey data collected on representative samples across 6 countries: China, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the UK, and the U.S. The survey collected information from households about their work and living situations and their income and socio-demographic characteristics. We find that young, low-income workers and urban dwellers are more vulnerable to containment and closure policies as they are more likely to lose their jobs and income. More importantly, our data provides supporting evidence to all of the predictions of our model

Strategic Risk Determinants Influencing Growth of SMEs: The Case of Vietnam

Risk is inherent in all business functions and in every kind of activities. This is especially true for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that are most exposed to the harmful effects of the risks, due to limited resources and structural features. Therefore, this study is conducted for identifying the relationship and impact strategic risk determinants including Political risks, Technological risks, Social risks on the growth of 30 small and medium forest enterprises (SMFEs) in Dien Bien as the case study. Political risks, Technological risks, Social risks are independent variables and the growth of SMFEs is a dependent variable. Data were collected through the questionnaire survey and using mean, correlation and regression analysis for this paper. The results show that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between strategic risk determinants on SMFEs growth. Keywords: Political risks, Technological risks, Social risks, Growth, SME

Rainfall variability and internal migration: the importance of agriculture linkage and gender inequality

This paper investigates the extent to which exposure to climate volatility can in-fluence individual migration decisions in Vietnam, based on the historical rainfall data from 70 weather stations in Vietnam and the Vietnam Access to Resources House-hold Survey. Utilizing the exogenous variation in the rainfall deviation from the local norms within an individual fixed-effects framework, we uncover the negative associa-tion between rainfall and the probability of individual migration. Individual migration probability drops by 7.5 percentage points when the amount of rainfall relative to the long-run local average doubles. This reduction could potentially be driven by individ-uals who work in the agricultural sector and are less likely to migrate as more rainfall could increase their agricultural incomes. Furthermore, our heterogeneity analyses sug-gest that rainfall shocks could perpetuate gender inequality in Vietnam since women cannot cope with climatic shocks through migration. Policy-makers could shift their focus on flood control and water management in affected areas, where people’s liveli-hoods depend on agriculture, to efficiently address issues related to climate-induced internal migration

PRELIMINARY DETERMINATION OF POLYCYCLIC AROMATIC HYDROCARBON (PAHS) IN AIR ENVIRONMENT AT MAJOR TRAFFIC JOINTS OF HANOI

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

CONTRIBUTION ESTIMATE OF PAHS TOXIC COMPOUNDS IN AIR ENVIRONMENT AT MAJOR TRAFFIC JOINTS OF HANOI, VIETNAM

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

An Ultra-high Quality Factor Terahertz Photonic Crystal Cavity

oai:ojs.rev-jec.org:article/345High quality factor Terahertz (THz) cavities are highly desired for many THz applications. This paper presents an ultra-high quality factor terahertz planar photonic crystal cavity at 300 GHz range. Two approaches are employed to reduce the losses in the cavity increasing the quality factor of the cavity. Firstly, short embedded photonic crystal waveguides are employed to reduce the in – plane loss. Secondly, a novel way of hole displacement is adopted for four edged holes of the L3 – type photonic crystal cavity to decrease the radiation loss. An ultra – high quality factor of 65000 at a resonant frequency of 315.3 GHz was achieved for the designed cavity. This result could enable promising applications such as THz sensing

COVID-19, lockdown and labor uncertainty

In this paper, we investigate the impact of containment and closure poli- cies amid the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market. We show that these effects depend on the presence of labor uncertainty. In the absence of labor uncertainty, the containment and closure policy resulted in people applying fewer self-protection measures, facing lower income and saving more. We predict that workers will lose their job as a consequence of this policy if and only if the containment elasticity of labor demand is sufficiently large. By contrast, when labor uncertainty is introduced, our model predicts more self-protection, more job loss and fewer savings as a result of a lockdown. In addition, income loss occurs if and only if the elasticity of labor demand is large enough. We test our predictions by employing new survey data collected on representative samples across 6 countries: China, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the UK, and the U.S. The survey collected information from households about their work and living situations and their income and socio-demographic characteristics. We find that young, low-income workers and urban dwellers are more vulnerable to containment and closure policies as they are more likely to lose their jobs and income. More importantly, our data provides supporting evidence to all of the predictions of our model

Rainfall variability and internal migration: the importance of agriculture linkage and gender inequality

This paper investigates the extent to which individual migration decisions in Vietnam can be driven by climate change, based on the historical rainfall data from 70 weather stations in Vietnam and the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey. Utilizing the exogenous variation in the rainfall deviation from the local norms within an individual fixed-effects framework, we uncover the negative association between rainfall and the probability of individual’s decision to migrate. We find that doubling the amount of precipitation relative to the long-run local average reduces the probability of migration by 7.5 percent. This result could potentially be driven by individuals who work in the agriculture sector and could have experienced an increase in income as high precipitation could lead to high yield. Furthermore, our heterogeneity analyses suggest rainfall shocks could perpetuate gender inequality in Vietnam as women are less likely to migrate when being affected by climate change. Policymakers could shift their focus to flood control and water management in affected areas, where people’s livelihoods depend on agriculture, to efficiently address issues related to climate-induced internal migration

The relative roles of domestic and foreign capital in aggregate production of GDP and CO2-equivalent emission across OECD countries

This paper adopts a two-stage stochastic frontier analysis framework to analyse the roles of foreign and domestic capital in the aggregate production of gross domestic product (GDP) and CO2-equivalent emissions across 36 OECD countries from 1990 to 2014. The first stage estimates a quadratic output directional distance function to derive the marginal products of foreign and domestic capital with respective to GDP and emissions. The second stage examines explanations for variations in the marginal rate of technical substitution (MRTS) of foreign and domestic capital across OECD countries. Our paper finds two important empirical evidence findings on the role of foreign capital in the aggregate production of desirable and undesirable outputs. Firstly, that foreign capital appears to be more effective than domestic capital in generating GDP and curbing CO2-equivalent emissions. We find that one standard deviation of GDP (or $2333 billion in 2011 dollars) would require$1857 billion (in 2011 dollars) of foreign capital in comparison with $4867 billion of domestic capital, ceteris paribus. On the other hand, the reduction of CO2-equivalent emissions by one standard deviation would demand$4091 billion (in 2011 dollars) of foreign capital relative to $16,539 billion of domestic capital. Second, foreign capital is more effective in reducing emissions in countries characterised by higher GDP per capita, larger population density, and higher shares of manufacturing sectors and exports