The institutional context influencing rural-urban migration choices and strategies for young married women and men in Vietnam

This report draws together secondary data and informed opinion relating to the wider context in which young married rural-urban migrants must craft strategies for managing their reproductive and family lives. In contrast to long standing patterns of male migration, the increasing numbers of migrants and the emergence of new forms of migration mean that young married women are increasingly moving for work too. The report outlines the wider situation in which these dynamics are occurring: the growing inequalities in the context of doi moi, the declining barrier that household registration poses to mobility, and the changing opportunities for work in the city. It also reviews changing gender relations in Vietnam with particular attention to changes in marriage and marital relations, in sexuality and fertility and in parenting. Finally it explores how changes in social entitlements in Vietnam may affect these migrants with special attention to maternal health, child health and children’s education. The report concludes that migrants with young families and new marriages face a plethora of barriers and opportunities that they must negotiate and that the strategies they formulate are dynamic and involve complex trade-offs

A Study on Re-enroll Intention Toward Advanced Level of Higher Education for International Students in Taiwan

This study developed a re-enroll intention model of higher education using international students studying Taiwan universities as a case. The relationships between proposed factors and re-enroll intention were investigated. The model was developed with five constructs, namely, service quality, perceived value, satisfaction, image, and re-enroll intention. The questionnaire survey was conducted with 418 international students studying at private and public universities located in northern, central, and southern Taiwan. The analyses of descriptive statistics and Structural Equation Model (SEM) were carried out in this study. The results revealed that satisfaction has the greatest positive effect on students’ re-enroll intention, followed by perceived value. In addition, the results also indicated that service quality, image, and perceived value have positive influence on satisfaction. These findings of this study can provide valuable information for management of higher education institutions when formulating competitive strategies to enhance re-enroll intention. Keywords: service quality, perceived value, image, satisfaction, re-enroll intention, SEM

Government Expenditure and Economic Growth in Vietnam: Does Public Investment Matter in The Long-Term?

Research aims: This study focuses on the correlation between public investment, current expenditure and payment for government debt, and economic growth in short-run and long-run estimations.Design/Methodology/Approach: Macro data of Vietnam in the period 1991-2020 were extracted from the World Bank and the Vietnam General Statistics Office. This research employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) for time series.Research findings: The results of this study uncovered that an improvement in public investment could enhance economic growth; it is also true of the government’s current spending. However, it is worth noting that the coefficients of changes in public investment and government current spending reduced the economic growth change in one and two periods ago. Moreover, debt payment was found to have a negative effect on the economy at all lags with different levels of significance.Theoretical contribution/Originality: This study provides empirical evidence on the role of government spending in economic growth, thereby confirming that Keynesian theory still holds in the case of Vietnam. The study also verifies the vital role of government activity in regulating economic development through investment and expenditure.Practitioner/Policy implication: Some important implications for policymakers focusing on government spending are: (i) The government needs to have an investment strategy that focuses on the important areas, such as infrastructure and technology foundation. (ii) Government needs to improve accountability and transparency in the management. (iii) Supportive policies on capital, technology, human resources, and the market must be continued to encourage economic investment activities. (iv) The selection, evaluation, and approval of investment portfolios should be carefully and appropriately made.Research limitation: This study was limited by looking at the overview of government spending with economic growth, ignoring the spending structure due to the lack of necessary data. Therefore, the following studies need to clarify the spending structure of Vietnam to determine which expenditure types have negative/positive impacts on economic growth, thereby providing incentive solutions and necessary support from the government

Improving the Knowledge of Port-A-Cath Care For Nurses

The purpose of this research project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a training program to improve the knowledge of port-a-cath care for staff nurses. The main objectives were to assess staff nurses’ knowledge of the port-a-cath care process before the training program and measure knowledge of the device and the procedures associated with the use and maintenance of the device after training. The study used a one group pretest and posttest design. Simple random sampling was done in Hoan My Sai Gon Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (N = 90). The study instrument was a questionnaire that consisted of 31 questions regarding knowledge of port-a-cath care. Data were analyzed using t-test and analysis of variance to determine the knowledge difference before and after a 40-minute training session. Only 8.89% of 90 nurses had received some training on port-a-cath care in their previous education and 91.11% had not been trained on port-a-cath care. The rate of nurses who took care of patients with port-a-cath was as follows: never—58.89%, one to five times—31.11%, 6-10 times——2.22%, and \u3e10 times—7.78%. In summary, the study intervention significantly increased nurses’ knowledge concerning port-a-cath care. The nurses achieved an average of 12.5 points on the pretest (40.4%). However, nurses’ scores increased an average of 27 points posttest (88.1%)

Supply chain information visibility and its impact on decision-making : an integrated model in the pharmaceutical industry : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Supply chain information visibility (SCIV) has been largely recognized as a key issue in pharmaceutical supply chain management. In recent years, there has been growing concern regarding the exponential growth and ubiquity of supply chain information as the result of the application of advanced technologies. Thus, the topic of visibility of information flow across a supply chain has attracted interest in both practice and academia. Despite the existence of considerable literature on SCIV, the concept is still under-theorized. The lack of a clear understanding of the characteristics of SCIV has made it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of SCIV and, consequently, hinders the improvement of SCIV (McIntire, 2014). Second, recent research identifies the potential of SCIV for operational performance through supporting managerial decision-making but also points out challenges and risks. In addition, there is a dearth of behavioral empirical research on supply chain management topics with which to achieve an increase in theory-building research in the field. This research addresses these gaps in the literature and investigates how SCIV across the pharmaceutical supply chain is perceived by pharmaceutical supply chain practitioners who are involved in supply chain decision-making, and how the decision-makers make use of SCIV in their supply chain decision-making process. This study adopted an exploratory, and qualitative approach to address two research questions: “How do supply chain professionals perceive SCIV in the pharmaceutical supply chain?” and “How do supply chain professionals make informed supply chain decisions?” The constructivist grounded theory methodology was used to guide the data gathering and analysis. The data were mainly drawn from semi-structured interviews with supply chain practitioners in New Zealand-based pharmaceutical firms, working at different levels of the supply chain, including manufacturers and distributors. Based on the findings a theoretical model was developed, the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Information-based Decision-Making Model. The model explains the behavioral supply chain decision-making process in the pharmaceutical supply chain, based on the existence of a given level of SCIV. The empirical findings suggest that SCIV is achieved both within and outside of the pharmaceutical firms and that human relational factors tend to be more beneficial than technological factors in developing SCIV. The importance of this finding is that it addresses a frequently asked question in recent literature about what constitutes SCIV and how to successfully build information visibility in a supply chain. Moreover, this research contributes to the behavioural supply chain management research literature by introducing a theoretical model of pharmaceutical supply chain information-based decision-making, which is grounded in the field data. The model offers significant theoretical insight into information-based decision-making in the pharmaceutical supply chain context based on empirical data, which has been largely overlooked in the supply chain management discipline. The empirical findings suggest that supply chain practitioners make information-based decisions in which they conduct an informative engaging mechanism with technological tools, with relevant stakeholders, and with themselves. Thus, the decision-making process involves extensive data analysis along with the crucial support of experience-based intuition and relevant stakeholders’ engagement. Another key contribution of this study is the identification of the constructive aspect of political behaviour in the supply chain decision-making process in which relevant stakeholders when invited to engage in the process tend to positively contribute and buy into the decision. Finally, this thesis provides significant practical implications and suggest directions for future research. Supply chain practitioners may benefit from the study by utilizing the study’s results to develop supply chain information visibility in their firms. In addition, the theoretical model of the information-based decision-making process explicates a useful step-by-step approach for supply chain practitioners to follow in making effective supply chain operational decisions. Recommendations for further research are provided, especially the recommendations for further studies that are crucially needed to assist firms to counter the pharmaceutical supply chain disruption risks caused by the Covid-19 pandemic

Inequality, rural development and food policy : essays in applied economics and microeconometrics

The thesis contains four essays on 'Inequality, Rural Development and Food Policy in Vietnam'. Re-examining the sources of ethnic inequality, the first essay uses instrumental variable approaches to provide consistent estimators of explanatory variables at household and commune levels for ethnic differences in household expenditure per person. Four key conclusions are drawn. First, removing language barriers significantly reduces ethnic inequality, especially through enhancing the gains earned by minorities from education. Second, variations in returns to education favour the majority in mixed communes, suggesting that special needs of minority students have not been adequately addressed, or that there exists unequal treatment in the labour market. Third, with the exception of hard-surfaced roads, there is little difference in the benefits drawn from enhanced infrastructure at the commune level across ethnic groups. Finally, contrary to established views, we find that as much as 49 to 66 percent of the ethnic gap is attributed to differences in endowments, not to differences in the returns to endowments. The second essay analyses the properties of the fixed-effects vector decomposition estimator, an emerging and popular technique for estimating time-invariant variables in panel data models with group effects. The formal analysis finds: (1) This decomposition is equivalent to a standard instrumental variables approach, for a specific set of instruments. (2) The estimator reproduces classical fixed-effects estimates for time-varying variables exactly. (3) The standard errors recommended for this estimator are too small for both time-varying and time-invariant variables. (4) The estimator is inconsistent when the time-invariant variables are endogenous. (5) The reported sampling properties in the original Monte Carlo evidence do not account for the presence of group effects. (6) The decomposition estimator has a higher risk than existing shrinkage approaches, unless the endogeneity problem is known to be small or no relevant instruments exist. The third essay examines the effects of extensive land and market reform in Vietnam on rice output and incomes, principally illustrated with measures of total factor productivity, net incomes and net returns in rice production from 1985- 2006. Results also show considerable gains in major rice growing areas, but recent evidence of a productivity 'slow down'. The differences over time and region speak to existing land use practice, calling for further reform. Stochastic frontier estimations detail the effects of remaining institutional and policy constraints, including existing restrictions on land use, ambiguous property rights, and inadequate markets for land and access to extension services and credit. The fourth essay analyses Vietnam's rice export policy and recent export ban in the context of rising food prices, drawing on insights from a regionally-disaggregated or 'bottom-up' CGE model and a micro-simulation using household data. Three main conclusions are drawn. First, although there is little impact on GDP, there are substantial distributional impacts across regions and households from different export policies and market conditions. Second, both rural and urban households, including poor households, benefit from free trade, even though domestic rice prices are higher. Finally, under free trade, relatively large gains accrue to rural households, where poverty is most pervasive

Peer Mentoring: A Way Forward for Supporting Preservice Efl Teachers Psychosocially During the Practicum

During the past several years, the importance of practicum as a vital proportion of the preservice teacher education program has been increasingly emphasized. There have been a number of initiatives for supporting preservice teachers. Among these, peer based relationship is increasingly emerged as an innovative strategy to provide additional support to preservice teachers. This paper reports on part of a larger study which investigated the impact of peer mentoring in the context of Vietnam. Using mixed methods research design, the study investigated the impact of a peer mentoring model on the preservice teachers’ perceptions of their psychosocial support from their peers during their practicum in Vietnam. A peer mentoring model was implemented with a group of preservice teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Data were collected from questionnaires and focus group interview with both a group of formally peer mentored preservice teachers and a group of formally non-peer mentored. The results revealed the preservice EFL teachers in the experimental group perceived more psychosocial support from their peer than those in the control group. The study affirms the empirical evidence for implementing a peer mentoring model for preservice EFL teachers during the practicum and echoes the need for a reform in the practicum