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This study aims to analyse the consumption inequality between farm and non-farm households in rural Vietnam, using the data from the 2016 Vietnam household living standards survey.

The present paper applies the “recentered influence functions (RIF)” in “Oaxaca-Blinder (OB)” type decomposition as proposed by Firpo et al. (2018) to allow for the flexible distribution of the outcome variables and the non-randomness of non-farm employment that violates the classical linearity assumption.

Non-farm households have significantly higher per capita consumption expenditure than farm households for the entire distribution. The gap in expenditure is large at low percentiles and narrowing with higher percentiles. At 10th percentile, the gap is estimated at 27.1%, but it is decreasing to 11.1% at 90th percentile. Most of the gaps are explained by the differences in the observed characteristics between farm and non-farm households such as ethnicity, education, income, internal transmittances and household composition. Non-farm households are endowed with more productive factors that result in higher per capita consumption expenditure.

Gaps in ethnicity and education are found to be key predictors of the inequality in consumption expenditures between farm and non-farm households, then, government policies that are aimed at increasing access to non-farm employment and education for ethnic minorities and for rural poor households are pathways to improve rural household welfare and hence reduce inequality.

This paper aims to examine the impact of competition on firm performance using a data set of 352 firms listed on Vietnam’s stock exchanges from 2015 to 2019.

The two-step system generalized method of moments is used to estimate this impact.

The findings reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between competition and firm performance. Competition improves firm performance if its intensity is moderate. However, if the competition intensity exceeds the optimal level, the performance deteriorates accordingly.

The authors only studied Vietnamese firms due to the limited ability in data collection. It would be better to validate the findings using data from other transition economies.

The non-linear relationship between competition and performance implies that government should pay more attention to retaining competition at an appropriate level.

Firms contribute a lot to the prosperity of Vietnam. Therefore, the findings have a meaningful implication for Vietnam’s government to moderate competition to improve its firms’ performance.

This paper contributes to the extant literature by providing firsthand evidence of the impact of competition on firm performance in Vietnam – a transition economy.

This study sought to examine the interaction between rural bank performance, information and communication technology (ICT) investment, ICT diffusion and financial development.

Data were sourced from the Association of Rural Banks (ARB) Apex and World Development Indicators (WDI) for the period 2014–2020. A total of 122 rural banks were used for this study. The study adopted the two-step system generalized method of moments (SGMM) estimation technique in assessing the interactions among variables.

This study found compelling evidence to support the positive effect of ICT investment on banks’ performance (return on asset and net interest margin). Further, ICT diffusion and financial development positively influence banks’ performance. The results show a positive moderating effect exerted by ICT diffusion and financial development on the impact of bank risk (bank stability) and ICT investment on all three performance measures.

The study focuses on the rural banking sector in the Ghanaian economy, compared to related studies that examine the subject matter for commercial banks. The moderating effects of ICT diffusion and financial development are assessed to guide policy on rural banking development in Ghana.

The Indian leather industry contributes to economic growth at a significant environmental cost. Due to the rising global demand for sustainable leather products, promoting efficient input utilisation has become vital. This study measures input efficiency and its determinants for leather industry in order for it to improve its future performance.

In the first stage, bootstrap data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is used for measuring efficiency and analysing firms' differences based on their geographical location, organisational structures, urban-rural location and sub-industrial groups. A second stage regression examines efficiency determinants using size, age, skill and capital-labour intensity as the explanatory variables.

Efficiency result shows a significant potential of minimising inputs by 47% provided the firms adopt best practices. West Bengal firms, urban located firms, individual and proprietorship owned firms and leather consumer goods firms are found to be relatively efficient to their counterparts. Size, skilled managerial staff and labour-intensive firms positively affect efficiency.

Construction of well-connected roads for accessing urban retail markets and provision of reliable electricity would improve efficiency of rural firms. Small-scale enterprises have a larger share in Indian leather industry; therefore, policy should focus on enhancing the firms' scale and investing in training facilities to skill employed labour for ensuring optimal use of inputs.

Previous studies on the leather industry have used the conventional DEA efficiency measurement approach. This study uses DEA bootstrapping model for robust efficiency estimates and provides consistent inferences about the determinants.

Although there are many efforts within organisations to improve the financial performance of business processes, the results of studies on the impact of internal factors on the financial performance of business processes in an organisation are inconsistent, even contradictory. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the extent and trends of the impact of factors inside companies on the financial performance of business processes and discover lessons learned to improve the financial performance of business processes.

This analysis was done through a quantitative study of listed companies in Vietnam. Pooled OLS regression, REM, FEM and robust regression were performed on 566 companies.

The results provide four main findings. First, firm size and operational efficiency strongly correlate with financial performance. Second, financial leverage has a negative, significant connection with financial performance. Third, net working capital has a positive and meaningful relationship with EPS and a negative association with ROE. Fourth, liquidity does not have any significant association with financial performance.

This study only restricts the internal factors affecting the financial performance of business processes without mentioning the external factors. Furthermore, this study is limited to one emerging country and has not been compared with companies in different countries.

The findings of this study may help inform users inside and outside the organisation to understand the factors that affect the financial performance of business processes. As a result, information users will focus more on aspects that can improve their financial performance to make informed decisions.

This study has many differences compared to previous studies. First, it focuses on the internal factors affecting the financial performance of business processes in non-financial listed companies in Vietnam, which has an emerging economy. First, it focuses on the internal factors affecting the financial performance of business processes in non-financial listed companies in Vietnam, which has an emerging economy. Second, this study analyses data in companies' financial statements for the ten years from 2012 to 2021, when the Vietnamese economy, in particular, and the world economy experienced many fluctuations due to the impact of the post-financial crisis 2007–2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, this study provides empirical evidence to support RBV, RDT theories and the trade-off theory of capital structure.

Single-party regimes increasingly use Subnational Performance Assessments (SPAs) – rankings of provinces and districts – to improve governance outcomes. SPAs assemble and publicize information on local government performance to facilitate monitoring and generate competition among officials. However, the evidence are sparse on their effects in this context. The authors argue that built-in incentive structures in centralized single-party regimes distort the positive impact of SPAs.

The staggered rollout of the Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) created a natural experiment. Due to 2010 budget constraints, the first iteration of the PAPI survey covered only 30 of Vietnam’s 63 provinces before covering all in 2011. The PAPI team used matching procedures to identify a statistical twin for each province before randomly selecting one from each pair. The authors use randomization inference to compare the outcomes of these control and treatment groups in 2011.

Exposure to PAPI helped improve almost all aspects of governance; however, significant evidence of prioritization bias exist. The positive effects only persisted for the dimension of administrative procedures, which was the one area of governance that was prioritized by the central government at the time. Other dimensions only registered short-term effects.

Our study provides an examination of the impact of SPAs in a single-party regime context. In addition, the authors leverage the natural experiment to identify information effects causally. The authors also look past short-term effects to compare outcomes for five years after the treatment occurred.

This paper aims to review and develop lessons learned from the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction Local Government Self Assessment Tool (LGSAT) experience in four cities. The capacity to understand, learn from and respond to or reorganize in the face of change is at the core of urban resilience to disasters, climate change and major shocks. Self assessments, like the LGSAT, can be used to engage city stakeholders in critically assessing and understanding their capacity according to a set of standards of resilience.

City stakeholders in four cities, Hat Yai and Udon Thani, Thailand and Hue and Lao Cai, Vietnam, completed the LGSAT in an open multi-stakeholder process as part of urban climate resilience programs.

Completing the LGSAT provided important and valuable information about institutional capacity that is important for disaster risk reduction and climate change efforts. Multi-stakeholder processes allowed for greater and more sustained dialogue among groups that may not have a chance to interact regularly and helped build trust and relationships that contribute to climate resilience and disaster risk reduction efforts.

Further, the inclusion of multiple viewpoints allowed for more nuanced and novel consideration of issues and in multiple cities led to new projects that focused on building institutional and agent capacity. The LGSAT process relied on facilitation that was able to guide discussion, ensure safe spaces for dialogue and address stakeholder questions. Finally, while the tool was applied to questions of climate change in this process, there is still room to improve the tool to more adequately and directly address issues of climate change risk.

This paper aims to fill a conceptual gap in the understanding of rapidly changing characteristics of local risk, addressing how the notion of the local might be reframed, and how opportunities for multi-scale interventions for disaster risk reduction might be identified.

The paper illustrates the significance of the systems and services on which urbanization depends – water, food, energy, transport and communications – to consider the cascading impacts at multiple scales often beyond the administrative boundaries of cities, and how vulnerabilities and risks are distributed unevenly across different groups of people.

The process of rapid urbanization in the Mekong Region represents a fundamental transformation of ecological landscapes, resource flows, livelihoods and demographics. In addition to the location of urbanization, it is these transformative processes and the critical dependence on inter-linked systems that shape the overall picture of urban disaster and climate vulnerability.

By drawing on research and practical experience in two of the most rapidly urbanizing countries in the world, Thailand and Vietnam, the approach and findings have implications for understanding global patterns of urbanization.

The paper contributes to considering practical actions whether in terms of policy or project implementation for both the assessment of disaster and climate risk, and for actions to reduce vulnerability and promote resilience.

The paper draws largely from social science perspectives, highlighting the dynamism of social organization in urbanizing contexts, and the implications for risk and vulnerability.

The paper draws on original research in Thailand and Vietnam that takes urbanization as the starting point for assessing vulnerability and risk.

This paper aims to undertake the efficiency analysis in the form of stochastic frontier to estimate a Cobb–Douglas production function by controlling for the heterogeneity across Russian firms by including firm size, ownership, age, innovation activity and market competition.

During the peak period of Covid-19, certain firms witnessed either a decrease or increase in sales. Using this segregation of firms from World Bank’s Covid-19 impact surveys follow-up to the Enterprise Survey for Russia, this study empirically investigates the determinants of technical efficiency of these firms focusing on the role of government assistance.

The findings suggest that by segregating firms in terms of sales, different internal factors can enable in steering through pandemic situation besides just depending on external assistance.

One of the few papers to analyse the impact of the pandemic on Russian firms by considering World Bank Covid Survey.

This study aims to investigate two issues: (1) a nexus between climate-related financial policies (CRFP) and global value chains (GVC) and (2) the government’s policies to help countries enhance the efficient use of CRFP in improving a country’s likelihood to participate in GVC.

To investigate the connection between GVC and CRFP, the authors incorporate that backward participation is measured using foreign value-added, while domestic value-added is used to measure forward participation, quantified as proportions of gross exports. The study analyses yield significant insights across a span of 20 developing countries and 26 developed countries over the period from 2010 to 2020.

Regarding the first issue, the authors affirm the presence of a linear link between GVC and CRFP, implying that involvement in CRFP is advantageous for both backward and forward participation. Furthermore, the authors identify long-term GVC and CRFP cointegration and confirm its long-term effects. Notably, the expression of a linear relationship between GVC and CRFP appears to be stronger in developing countries.

The study findings, together with previous research, highlight the importance of financial policies relating to climate change (CRFP) in the context of economic growth. Climate change’s consequences for financial stability and GVC highlight the importance of expanded policymakers and industry participation in tackling environmental concerns.

Regarding the second issue, the study findings suggest critical policy implications for authorities by highlighting the importance of financial stability and expanded policymakers in promoting countries' participation in GVC.

This paper investigates the link between GVC performance and CRFP, offering three significant advances to previous research. Moreover, as a rigorous analytical method, this study adopts a typical error model with panel correction that accounts for cross-sectional dependency and stationarity.