Internal Determinants and Effects of Firm-Level Environmental Performance: Empirical Evidences from Vietnam

Pham Quynh Anh

Asian Social Science, 11(4)

The paper explores the internal determinants of a manufacturing firm’s environmental performance indexed by acquiring government or ISO 14001 certificate and its impacts on the firm’s competitiveness in Vietnam, using a panel logistic and a modified Cobb-Douglas model respectively. It is found that firm size; environmental management system (EMS), foreign ownership, environmental staff, high technology level and middle age are factors increasing a firm’s possibility conforming to the ISO 14001 standards while domestics’ private ownership and low-or medium technology levels are constraints. There is no conclusive relationship between firm’s environmental performance, state ownership and old, young age. Firm’s environmental performance has no significant impact on its competitiveness measured by labor productivity.

http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/view/44278

Marginal Damage Cost of Nutrient Enrichment: The Case of the Baltic Sea

Thanh Viet Nguyen, Lars Ravn-Jonsen & Niels Vestergaard

Environmental and Resource Economics volume 64, pages 109–129(2016)

The purpose of this article is to investigate the link between marine pollution and marine renewable resources. An extended bio-economic model of a fishery is developed to include nutrient enrichment and built into a general model of the polluting and fishery sector with nutrient concentration and fish stock as state variables. The marginal damage function for nutrient enrichment is derived. This function can be compared with the marginal abatement cost and hence it provides a basis for policies that balance the use of nutrients in land-based industries (for example agriculture) with the external cost to the marine environment. The model is empirically applied to the case of the Baltic Sea, where Eastern Baltic cod fisheries are affected by nutrient enrichment. The results indicate that nitrogen loading needs to be reduced slightly (around 1 %) to reach optimal levels. The results also show that the optimal fishery policy plays a more important role in producing the net benefits than nitrogen reduction policies do. Further, the impact on the productivity of the fish stock from pollution reduction is higher when an optimal policy is followed.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-014-9859-8

International small dam safety assurance policy benchmarks to avoid dam failure flood disasters in developing countries

John D.Pisaniello, Tuyet Thi Dam, Joanne L.Tingey-Holyoaka

Journal of Hydrology, Volume 531, Part 3, December 2015, Pages 1141-1153 (2015)

In developing countries small dam failure disasters are common yet research on their dam safety management is lacking. This paper reviews available small dam safety assurance policy benchmarks from international literature, synthesises them for applicability in developing countries, and provides example application through a case study of Vietnam. Generic models from ‘minimum’ to ‘best’ practice (Pisaniello, 1997) are synthesised with the World Bank’s ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’ elements (Bradlow et al., 2002) leading to novel policy analysis and design criteria for developing countries. The case study involved 22 on-site dam surveys finding micro level physical and management inadequacies that indicates macro dam safety management policy performs far below the minimum benchmark in Vietnam. Moving assurance policy towards ‘best practice’ is necessary to improve the safety of Vietnam’s considerable number of hazardous dams to acceptable community standards, but firstly achieving ‘minimum practice’ per the developed guidance is essential. The policy analysis/design process provides an exemplar for other developing countries to follow for avoiding dam failure flood disasters.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002216941500829X

A new integrated fuzzy QFD approach for market segments evaluation and selection

Luu Quoc Dat, Thinh Thi Phuong, Hsing-Pei Kao, Shuo-Yan Chou, Pham Van Nghia

Applied Mathematical Modelling, Volume 39, Issue 13, 1 July 2015, Pages 3653-3665 (2015)

Market segment selection and evaluation are critical marketing activities of all companies. To evaluate and select appropriate market segments, several decision makers and criteria must be involved in the decision process. This study proposes a new integrated fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) to support the market segment selection and evaluation process. The proposed approach identifies the features that the market segments should have (“WHATs”), in order to fit with the company’s business strengths (“HOWs”). In the proposed approach, the relative importance of the “WHATs”, the “HOWs”–“WHATs” correlation scores, the resulting weights of the “HOWs”, and the impact of each potential market segment, are assessed in linguistic values. The functions of the averaged ratings and averaged weights are then defined, and fuzzy TOPSIS is used to obtain the final ranking of alternatives. The computational procedure of the proposed approach is further illustrated through a case study. Finally, this paper compares the proposed approach with another fuzzy QFD approach, demonstrating the advantages of the proposed approach.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0307904X14006465

Determinant of Access to Rural Credit and Its Effect on Living Standard: Case Study about Poor Households in Northwest, Vietnam

Tran Thi Thanh Tu, Nguyen Quoc Viet, Hoang Huu Loi

International Journal of Financial Research, Sciedu Press, 6(2), pages 218-230 (2015)

This study investigated the determinants of accessibility to formal credit and its effects on living standards from 2010 to 2012 based on dataset of Vietnam Households Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) from the General Statistics Office of Vietnam and support of Eview 7 program. It is evident that average of education level, land area per capita, owned residential area affect is key factors of accessing to credit; meanwhile, average of education level affects the probability to require and amount of credit. Interestingly, we find that poor recognize by local and rate of non-farm income is positive factor of accessibility on formal credit; in addition, interest rate has statistically significant, implying has impact on loan amount. In otherwise, by using DID (Note 2) approach and OLS (Note 3) model for analyzing panel dataset in 2010, 2012; we find that have only impact of accessing to loan on education expense in short-term. Next, the results also indicate that enhance education level and rate of non-agriculture income lead to achievement of living standards.

http://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/ijfr/article/view/6864

A note on poverty among ethnic minorities in the Northwest region of Vietnam

Tuyen Quang Tran,Son Hong Nguyen,Huong Van Vu &Viet Quoc Nguyen

Journal of Post-Communist Economies, 27(2), 268-281 (2015)

This article is the first to investigate both community and household determinants of poverty among ethnic minorities in the Northwest region of Vietnam. Results of a fractional logit and a logit model show that fixed assets, education and off-farm employment, among other household factors, have a strongly reducing effect on both the intensity and incidence of poverty. Furthermore, some commune characteristics were found to be closely linked to poverty. Notably, the presence of means of transport and post offices significantly reduces both poverty intensity and incidence. However, other commune and household factors affect only poverty incidence or intensity but not both. Hence, a typical approach using a logit/probit model that only examined the determinants of poverty incidence did not adequately evaluate or even ignored important impacts of some factors on poverty intensity. We draw both socio-economic household and commune level implications for poverty alleviation in the study area.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14631377.2015.1026716?journalCode=cpce20