Assessing Consumer Preferences for Organic Vegetables: A Case Study in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

An increase in consumer’s demand for environmental and health quality has generated the movement of organic agriculture in terms of high-value products. Understanding consumer preferences is very necessary and important for policy-makers to design appropriate policies promoting and developing organic agriculture. This study employed a dichotomous choice contingent valuation model to analyze consumer’s willingness to pay for organic vegetables in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Results indicated that the majority of consumers were interested in organically grown products and willing to pay an average price premium of 59% for organic vegetables. Consumers concerned about health and food safety were more likely to purchase and those who have high household income and education also accepted to buy organic vegetables with higher price than conventional ones

Farmer Perceptions and Demand for Pesticide Use: A Case Study of Rice Production in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

Rice farmers’ perceptions and demand for pesticide use were analyzed using survey data in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. The study showed although the majority of farmers could recognize the harmful effects of pesticides, they did not wear protective clothing suggested by WHO for pesticide safety use because they did not feel comfortable to use under local climatic conditions. Most of farmers declared that they asked for information or instructions related to pesticide use and pest prevention from retailers (72.5 percent) and over half of them (52.5 percent) sold their pesticide empty packages. The study also investigated that an increase in output price or farmers who thought an increasing tendency of insects and diseases had positive impacts on pesticides, while farmers who had knowledge on natural enemies or took part in short trainings or workshops applied less pesticides than others

Probabilistic Multilevel Clustering via Composite Transportation Distance

We propose a novel probabilistic approach to multilevel clustering problems based on composite transportation distance, which is a variant of transportation distance where the underlying metric is Kullback-Leibler divergence. Our method involves solving a joint optimization problem over spaces of probability measures to simultaneously discover grouping structures within groups and among groups. By exploiting the connection of our method to the problem of finding composite transportation barycenters, we develop fast and efficient optimization algorithms even for potentially large-scale multilevel datasets. Finally, we present experimental results with both synthetic and real data to demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure

A case study: Institutional Factors Affecting Lecturers’ Research Engagement in A University in Mekong Delta region, Vietnam

This case study investigated institutional factors affecting university lecturers’ research engagement in a multidisciplinary higher education institution in the Mekong Delta region, Vietnam. The study employed the interpretive qualitative case study approach with the use of three data collection tools (document analysis, surveys, and recorded semi-structured interviews). In this paper, the authors presented the findings of document analysis and the recorded semi-structured interviews. The findings indicated that institutional factors affecting lecturers’ research engagement in this studied university included governmental policies, funding and structure, resources, teaching loads, leadership and research environment. The paper suggested some recommendations to foster the lecturers’ research engagement in this university