Journal of International Economics and Management

We investigate factors from firm side that determine their financing pattern for new investment projects and their decision to choose formal, informal credit, or both. For financing pattern of new investment project, we use Random-effect model while Unordered-Multinomial Logistic is used to estimate probability of choosing any of four choices to access to finance, say, formal credit, informal credit, both of them, or none of them. Our analysis is based on a panel of around 2200 small and medium sized enterprises with 7900 observations extracted from the “Survey of small and medium scale manufacturing enterprises in Vietnam” in 2005, 2007, and 2009.

This paper applies gravity model in order to analyze bilateral trade activities between Vietnam and 60 countries from 2000 to 2010. We exploited the panel data on international trade of Vietnam taken from the data banks of International Trade Centre, International ‘Monetary Fund and World Bank. The estimated results reveal that economic size of Vietnam, economic size and market size of foreign partners, distance and culture have important - effects on bilateral trade flows between Vietnam and these 60 countries. By applying method of speed of convergence, we also find out that Vietnam has trade potential especially with some new markets such as Africa and Western Asia.

This study investigates factors affecting consumers’ behavioral intention of using digital wallets in Vietnam. The research model consists of five independent variables, namely performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, and perceived risks. The sample size of this study is 280. This study confirms that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions positively influence the behavioral intention of using digital wallets. Importantly, performance expectancy and effort expectancy are the most significant determinants of behavioral intention. Perceived risks are found to negatively affect the behavioral intention of using digital wallets. These findings indicate that service providers ought to focus on enhancing digital wallets’ user-friendliness, features, and functions to improve financial transactions via digital wallets. The security system of digital wallets also needs improving to reduce risks, thereby encouraging Vietnamese consumers to utilize the service.

The Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) paradigm became the dominant framework for empirical work in Industrial Organization starting from the early 1950s.1 There have been a large number of empirical researches in the literature examining the SCP hypothesis for various countries in the world. Nevertheless, empirical works in this literature for Vietnamese firms are still scared. This paper shows that, in general, the SCP paradigm fits Vietnamese firm data well. Concentration level (C in SCP) of the industry and barriers to entry (S in SCP) are key factors affecting firm performance (P in SCP). We find evidence that higher concentration ratio yields higher performane of firms. This finding provides important empirical evidence on Vietnam’s restructuring process, especially the stated-own enterprises. Vietnam has many economic groups that definitely posses high market power, hence enjoy higher returns. If some of these groups are not efficiently performing, this paper suggests that the government should “dillute” their industry by easing up the entry process hence to increase competitiveness of the industry. The ease of accessing different provinces in Vietnam – a special type of barriers to entry – proves to generate higher performance of firms. This finding is meaningful for provincial authorities in designing policy to promote investment in their localities. Keywords: debt crisis, policy implications

This paper analyses the effect of brand image, perceived quality, perceived uniqueness on loyalty of customers in the mobile telecom industry. The data for this study were gathered through face-to-face questionnaires that were distributed to target participants, who reported their consumption experience with mobile telecom services. The survey was conducted in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city with the sampling of 453 respondents. We used the Structured Equation Model to evaluate the suitability of the framework and examine the hypotheses. The results reveal that brand equity impacts directly customer satisfaction and has indirect effect on loyalty via customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this research is to explore the factors affecting international tourists’ satisfaction of street food in Ho Chi Minh city. This study used convenience samples with 203 international tourists in Ho Chi Minh city and employed linear regression analysis. The results indicated that all the factors affecting the international tourists’ satisfaction towards street food, ranked in order of importance are as follows: (i) food quality, (ii) food hygiene, (iii) food price, (iv) food variety, (v) attitude of staff, (vi) food environment, (vii) food information, and (viii) food heritage. Some policies are recommended to tourist agencies and authorities to improve international tourists’ satisfaction towards street food.

The study evaluates the overall situation of Vietnam’s fisheries exports and uses the Global Simulation Analysis of Industry-Level Trade Policy model (the GSIM model) to predict the impact of the CPTPP agreement on Vietnam’s fisheries exports to the CPTPP members. It is forecasted that the CPTPP has positive effects on Vietnam’s fisheries exports. One of those is that it is promising for Vietnamese producers/exporters to access Mexico, which is a large market in the southern portion of North America. In addition, Vietnam has the advantage to continue increasing export earnings to the Japanese market after the CPTPP takes effect. By sub-sector, all sub-sectors have a positive impact on consumers/importers as well as producers/exporters. In terms of export value, all sub-sectors have increased export value, especially the Crustaceans, molluscs and other aquatic invertebrates, prepared or preserved (HS1605) export to Japan and the fish fillets and other fish meat (whether or not minced), fresh, chilled or frozen (HS0304) has significant export rise to Mexico. Nevertheless, the reduction of import tax revenues reduces the welfare of the fisheries sector.

This paper investigates the impact of governance characteristics on financial performance of companies listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange. By employing the system generalized method of moments estimator and a panel dataset covering 152 firms over the period from 2011 to 2016, our results indicate that corporate governance characteristics namely the size of board and block-holder ownership, affect the financial performance of Vietnamese firms. Surprisingly, no statistically significant evidence is found concerning the impact of other characteristics such as board gender diversity, CEO duality and non-executive director representation on firm performance.

The study assesses the influence of brand awareness, perceived quality, and brand association on e-brand loyalty of consumers in online retailing service (e-tailing service) in Vietnam context. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to identify dimensions of customerbased brand equity and its construct. Three hypotheses were posited to empirically test with sampled data of 125 consumers. The result of regression analysis shows that all of variables, which are brand awareness, perceived brand quality, and brand association, positively impact on e-brand loyalty. Brand association has the most influential impact on the customers when appraising the online shopping. This study contributes to enrich the brand management literature. The study’s findings are suggestive to managers of e-tailing services.

According to the traditional cost behavior, costs are categorized as fixed or variable costs. Variable costs change proportionately with changes in the activity driver. Nevertheless, empirical evidence shows that cost increase with activity increase is more rapid than cost decrease with activity decrease. This phenomenon is named as sticky cost. In this paper, we measure the cost stickiness of each company and answer the research question that whether sticky costs affect the profitability of listed companies in Vietnam. We find that selling costs, general costs, and administration costs of listed companies in Vietnam are sticky in period 2011 – 2015, and the situation is more serious than the case of US and Brazil. Our analysis shows that the stickiness of selling and administration costs affects the earnings per share forecast. The paper suggests some recommendations for managers to avoid the negative effects of sticky cost on business performance.