Foreign direct investment and the labour market in Vietnam's services sector

The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate, theoretically and empirically, the impacts of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the host labour market. Specific objectives focus on exploring the role of FDI firms in determining wages and the employment of female workers (hereafter referred to as female employment) by domestic firms, using the empirical case of the services sector in Vietnam. While the literature suggests that foreign firms, especially large multinationals, tend to pay higher and employ women more intensively than local firms, there is scant evidence on whether and how FDI firms can influence domestic firms' wages and gendered employment, notably in the context of service industries. This thesis contributes to filling these knowledge gaps from both theoretical and empirical grounds. To realise the research objectives, I constructed two theoretical models to illustrate how the presence of FDI firms can be a determinant of local firms' pay and employment decisions. The first model shows that foreign presence can influence the expected average wage of domestic firms (causing so-called 'wage spillovers') through two contrasting channels, namely productivity spillovers and cut-off capability. The second model shows that FDI firms can affect domestic firms' female employment (measured by female-to-male labour ratio), directly via augmented female productivity spillovers and indirectly via the cut-off effect. The ultimate impact of foreign presence on wage and female employment depend on the relative strength of the two channels. Guided by the theoretical frameworks, I then specified two econometric models to empirically test and estimate the impacts of FDI firms on average wage and female employment of domestic counterparts. The empirical analyses utilise rich panel datasets of firms in Vietnam's services sector over the five-year period 2009-2013, which were extracted from the enterprise survey database of the General Statistics Office (GSO). In the specified models, foreign presence is the variable of interest and measured by the employment share of FDI firms in an industry, region and year. To address the potential endogeneity problem, I utilised the Generalised Method of Moments with Instrumental Variable (IV-GMM) estimation technique. Of this method, I adopted a novel approach to constructing IVs, which capitalises on the geographical and industry segmentation of the local labour market. In the estimation procedure, I conducted a number of diagnostic checking, including the endogeneity test, underidentification and overidentification tests (for the relevance and validity of selected instruments), and accounted for multicollinearity, autocorrelation, and heteroskedasticy problems. The estimation results indicate that FDI firms exert positive and statistically significant impacts on the pay level and female employment of domestic firms in Vietnam's services sector. Specifically, a one per cent increase in foreign presence induces local firms to raise their real wage and female-to-male labour ratio by 1.15 per cent and 2.18 per cent on average, respectively. The findings also suggest that higher paying firms tend to be larger, state owned, more capital intensive, and well established. Additionally, smaller, privately owned, less labour-intensive firms are more likely to hire women at a higher rate. To provide deeper insights into the heterogeneity of FDI-linked impacts, I extended the analysis by examining different layers of disaggregation. Notably, at the two-digit Vietnam SIC level, the scatterplots of the data and the estimation results reveal divergent effects of foreign presence on domestic firms' wages (positive in the high-wage group and negative in the low-wage group), and female employment (positive in the male-intensive group and insignificant in the female-intensive group). Likewise, additional investigations at the three-digit level show heterogeneous FDI impacts, depending on specific characteristics of domestic and foreign firms. While the existence of positive FDI impacts at the overall sector level may imply services FDI attraction as a viable strategy to improve local wages and promote female employment opportunities, the findings of heterogeneous effects warrant a more cautious and selective approach to be adopted by local firms, workers and governments in policy and decision formulation

ENHANCING COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE VIA ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES OF SPEAKING SKILLS FROM COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

In teaching language, testing and evaluation play a very important role in helping teachers identify the proficiency, levels of acquiring knowledge, language skills of students, and assessing the problems that exist in learning and teaching. Thanks to assessment activities, teachers actively adjust and improve teaching methods, helping students solve the difficulties they face. This article focuses on the assessment activities of English-speaking skills through Communicative Approach (CA) for law-major students in order to improve speaking skills effectively. The study was conducted to 80 law-major students at the Hanoi Law University. The findings showed that communicative approach assessment measures bring about a number of benefits and challenges as well as expresses the perspectives of students towards applying CA in assessing speaking skill

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF SHRIMP CULTURE IN THE MANGROVE AREAS OF VIETNAM

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Blended Learning for Secondary Schools in Nam Dinh Province to Satisfy New Standards: The Current Situation and Proposed Models

We offered blended learning models for high schools in Nam Dinh province to satisfy Vietnam's new criteria. These models were based on general approaches to issues, theoretical research, and field research based on surveys and anket questionnaires conducted throughout the area. The results of a survey demonstrate that high school teachers in Nam Dinh have gained a fundamental grasp of blended learning and have, in practice, embraced both online and face-to-face instruction, particularly during the height of the Covid-19 outbreak. However, there was not a standard model for blended learning, therefore it was only used by a few persons. In other contexts, the concept of "blended learning" referred to what was effectively a face-to-face session that was broadcast over the Internet without the necessary adjustments being made to the content, methodology, or evaluation. As a result, we offer a number of different ways to blended learning for high schools in Nam Dinh in order to improve the quality of education provided throughout the province

How does FDI affect domestic firms' wages? theory and evidence from Vietnam

This paper explores the role of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) as a determinant of domestic firms' wages, namely wage spillovers. We first construct a theoretical model to demonstrate that the presence of FDI firms affects domestic firms' expected average wages via productivity spillovers and a cut-off capability. We then estimate FDI-induced wage spillovers by employing IV-GMM estimator with a five-year panel dataset of a growing service industry in Vietnam. Despite FDI firms on average pay 2.25 times that of domestic firms, they put a downward pressure on domestic firms' wages. A one percent increase in FDI presence causes domestic firms to cut average wages by 2.03 percent. The estimations also find that firm-specific features are attributable to significant differences in their wages as well as FDI-linked wage spillovers

Physiochemical properties, antibacterial and antioxidant activities of Terminalia catappa seed oils from two extracting processes

Terminalia catappa is a widespread medium tree species in many tropical countries. While the majority of the studies up to date focuses on the aerial part of the plant such as leaf, stem bark and fruit, information about the phytochemical property as well as the biological property of the edible seed is still scarce. This study was the first to explore the fatty acid composition, antibacterial and antioxidant activities of the seed oil from T. catappa grown in Vietnam. The results showed that both the hot-pressed and cold-pressed oils contained a high level of unsaturated fatty acids such as oleic (~32%) and linoleic acids (28.38%-29.2%), as well as saturated fatty acids such as palmitic acid (~33.3%-33.61%). The presence of eicosadienoic acid in T. catappa seed oils was reported in this study for the first time. These oils displayed antibacterial activity against 5 out of 12 tested strains such as Bacillus cereus, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Vibrio parahaemolyticus. The antioxidant activity of the oils was also recorded by DPPH radical scavenging assays with IC50 values of 950 µg/ml and 2529 µg/ml for cold-pressed oil and hot-pressed oil respectively. This study has provided promising extracting methods and resulted in oils that could be good candidates for developing food sources with valuable fatty acids, antioxidant and antibacterial capacities against both Gram-positive and negative bacteria in the human diet

ANTIBACTERIAL AND PHOTOCATALYTIC ABILITY OF THE Ag/TiO2 COATING ON THE GLASS SURFACE.

The coating on the glass surface was made by heating the mixture of resinate Ag and tetra-n-butyl orthotitanate (TBO) at 570 oC for 1 hour. The characteristics and structure of the mixture Ag/TiO2 with the content of Ag : TiO2 from 0 – 8 (% mol) were studied by the methods such as XRD, FTIR, UV-viz, SEM, EDS. The research results of antibacterial ability and the degradation of blue methylene (MB) were shown that this coating can be used for antibacterial and photocatalytic abilit

INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT OF RISK LEVEL CAUSED BY HAZARDS IN THE COASTAL ZONE OF VIETNAM (CASES STUDY : CAM RANH-PHAN RI COASTAL ZONE)

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Insiders, Outsiders and Performance of Vietnamese Firms

The consensus in the finance literature is that a large proportion of inside ownership (defined as greater than 5% share ownership by non-institutional holders, managerial holdings, founding family holdings, cross-shareholdings by affiliated firms and ownership by creditors) tends to be associated with more unsatisfactory performance (as measured by ROE or ROA) when compared to firms with lower inside ownership, all else equal. However, this need not be the case if insiders act as monitors of the firm and have the same interest in returns as outsiders.  Ownership structure and firm level financial performance have not been widely studied in Vietnam.  Using data from 729 listed firms in Vietnam for 2018, we test the hypothesis that greater insider ownership has a negative impact on firm performance. We found that Vietnam's insiders play a monitoring role, exercising their relative power to ensure the firm's profitable functioning. These findings are inconsistent with research on Japanese groupings, as well as other findings. The Vietnamese stock market does not appear to be negatively affected by insider influence; indeed, insiders appear to act as positive monitors.

Exploiting secure performance of full-duplex decode and forward in optimal relay selection networks

In the presence of an illegitimate user, we investigate the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the optimal relay selection (ORS) networks by applying decode-and-forward (DnF) based full-duplex (FD) relaying mode. The closed-form expressions for the allocations of the end-to-end signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in each wireless network are derived as well as the closed-form expression for the exact SOP of the proposed ORS system is presented under Rayleigh fading schemes. As an important achievement, SOP is also compared between orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes. Our results reveal that the SOP of the suggested scheme can be considerably influenced by several parameters involved, including the number of relays, the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of eavesdropper links, transmit power and the average residual self-interference (SI) enforced on the FD relays.Web of Science244767