The impact of recentralisation on FDI : evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

This research is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under Grant No. 502.02-2020.09.Although decentralised governance has been one of the most salient political regimes worldwide over the past few decades, many countries have started to realise various shortcomings associated with their decentralisation process. As a consequence, a number of central governments have attempted to pursue recentralisation reforms in order to reclaim authority from the localities. This government reform can lead to significant changes in institutional arrangements, and subsequently, may influence various aspects of socio-economic activities. However, the real impact of recentralisation reform still remains ambiguous. In this paper, we examine how recentralisation may affect foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. We exploit the pilot recentralisation reform that temporarily abolished the intermediate legislative branches in some provinces in Vietnam as a quasi-natural experiment. The result shows that recentralisation leads to a significant reduction in FDI inflows. Our results are robust to a number of sensitivity analyses and falsification tests. Overall, our findings contribute to the literature on the determinants of FDI and provide new evidence on the real effect of recentralisation reform.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The impact of corruption on the performance of newly established enterprises : empirical evidence from a transition economy

This paper investigates the effects of corruption on the performance of newly established enterprises. Using longitudinal data from enterprise surveys containing virtually all firms over the period from 2011 to 2015 in Vietnam, we find that corruption deteriorates firm financial performance, and subsequently exposes them to a greater failure probability. We further find that, while corruption imposes more harmful effects on the performance and survival of private domestic firms, it exerts no significant impact on state-owned firms. On the other hand, foreign firms are also able to take advantage of corruption to enhance their performance and survivability. In addition, our results suggest that the more mature firms are better at dealing with corruption and can eventually take advantage of it to enhance their performance. The results are robust after various model specifications as well as alternative classifications of newly established firms.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

DIFFICULTIES IN WRITING ESSAYS OF ENGLISH MAJORED SOPHOMORES AT TAY DO UNIVERSITY, VIETNAM

Writing skill is an important part of communication, which helps people express ideas, experiences, and feeling exactly. Good writing skill allows them to communicate their message with clarity and ease to a far larger audience than through face-to-face or telephone conversations. However, students often face some difficulties when writing. This survey research presents the process of the study of “Difficulties in writing essays of English majored sophomores at Tay Do University”. It was conducted to find out some difficulties in learning writing of 53 sophomores from 12A and 12B classes at Tay Do University. The questionnaire, interview questions, and essay samples were instruments of this research. The results showed that sophomores had many difficulties in writing essays such as vocabulary, grammar structures, idea arrangement, background knowledge, and others. Basing on the research results, students could recognize their difficulties and find ways to overcome them. Article visualizations

Exploring Knowledge Sharing Practices for Raising Security Awareness

This study aims to explore the types of information can be effectively communicated in three knowledge-sharing methods and their impact on employees’ security practice. On one end, guarding the organisation’s information system against cyber-attacks is critical and improving users’ knowledge and skills is a common approach to any security program. On the other end, organisations lack a clear understanding in determining what types of security information should be delivered through various methods of communication to be effective in boosting users’ knowledge and compliance behaviour. The study employed a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews with business users in Vietnam. The initial findings indicate a single method of knowledge and skill development is not sufficient to assist users to deal with complex and constant changing security needs. It is necessary to further experiment methods of encouraging formal and peer knowledge sharing that can support individual effort in complying with security policies

US-China rivalry in Southeast Asia region: a study on the South China Sea case

Southeast Asia is one of the places where fierce rivalry is taking place between the two leading powers in the world today - the US and China. The US-China rivalry in this region takes place in key fields, from politics - diplomacy, economy, security - defense to "soft power", the most prominent of which is the South China Sea issue. This article analyzes the strategic importance of the South China Sea in the policy of the US and China, the competition between the US and China in Southeast Asia in general, and the South China Sea in particular. To achieve this goal, the authors use research methods in international relations to analyze the main issues of the study. In addition to reviewing previous scholarly research and reviews, the authors use a comparative approach to assess the interactions between theory and data. The authors believe the data is important for accurately assessing the strategic competition between the US and China in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. The rise of China in the early years of the XXI century strongly influenced the adjustment of the US policy in Southeast Asia and the powerful US-China rivalry in this region and the South China Sea. This rivalry is becoming increasingly complicated, and geopolitical conflicts between major powers are possible in the following years

Towards Safer Operations: An Expert-involved Dataset of High-Pressure Gas Incidents for Preventing Future Failures

This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2023 (The Industry Track

AGING OF WATERBORNE PAINT BASED ON THE ACRYLIC RESIN EMULSION AND ORGANIC PIGMENT

Aging of waterborne paint on the base of acrylic resin emulsion with and without green Luconyl have been investigated by general appearance assessment, adhesion change, FT-IR and discoloration. The obtained results showed that the both of paint-formulas coatings had no cracks, blisters, flacks and there was no change of adhesion during the aging process. However, IR analysis indicated that there were some changes in chemical structures of coating with and without Green Luconyl during aging process. To specify, IR spectrums of initial and aged coating no containing Green Luconyl illustrated aging process led content of O-H and C=C increased significantly but baseline of spectra was fairly unchanged. For coating filled Green Luconyl, IR spectrums’ shape was fairly stable but baseline saw a clear reduce during accelerated weather exposure. Moreover, SEM images indicated that surfaces morphology of samples changed differently depending on in presence of organic pigment. Surface of aged coating without Luconyl saw rougher than surface of coating with Luconyl after aging process. Hence, the weather aging test had more significant influence on paint coating in absence of Luconyl than paint coating in presence of Luconyl. It was explained that the macroradical produced in aging process would attack into conjugated double bonds of Luconyl instead of double bonds of AC-261 leading to aged coating filled Luconyl become more opaque than initial while coating no filled Luconyl had significant changes in chemical structure during aging process. Although this was a hypothesis, it saw a suitable with the obtained results. The paint coating in presence of Luconyl illustrated significant color change, especially, showed the loss of green color while the other paint coating showed slight color change

Adopting the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index to estimate the financial sustainability of Vietnamese public universities

Over several decades, the Vietnamese government has increasingly cut its investment in the public higher education system and has also introduced a cost-sharing mechanism. Under this scheme, Vietnamese public universities have been seeking other sources of revenue. Despite the bold emphasis on the need for revenue diversification in higher education in Vietnam, there is little empirical evidence of the status quo of Vietnamese public higher education finance. The purpose of this paper was to fill this research gap by using the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index to estimate the degree of financial diversity in 51 public universities in Vietnam between 2015 and 2017. Our findings revealed that all institutions in this study were unsustainable due to their weak financial diversity. Suggestions for policy makers and university leaders that may enhance financial sustainability include the adoption of performance-based financial allocations and the implementation of capacity-building programs for universities with regard to fund-raising and entrepreneurship skills

DIFFICULTIES IN STUDYING TOEIC LISTENING COMPREHENSION OF NON–ENGLISH MAJORED FRESHMEN AT TAY DO UNIVERSITY, VIETNAM

TOEIC Certificate is becoming more and more popular all over the world in general and in particular, Vietnam. It is considered as one of the most compulsory demands for graduating university, especially at Tay Do university. Listening seems to be a skill that many students usually face difficulties in learning. Therefore, the survey research “Difficulties in studying TOEIC Listening Comprehension of non – English majored freshmen at Tay Do University” was conducted to figure out common difficulties in studying TOEIC listening of non-English majored students. Freshmen of Bachelor of Tourism and Travel Management class at Tay Do university were chosen as the participants. Questionnaire and interview were used as instruments to collect the data. The findings of the study would point out learners’ difficulties consisting of general difficulties (vocabulary, pronunciation, background knowledge and psychological) and difficulties in each part in the TOEIC listening test. Thanks to the results, some solutions would be suggested for students’ improvement. Article visualizations