Bài nghiên cứu (English)

Final report from the project “Online Price and Inflation Nowcasting” conducted by Viet Nam Institute for Economic and Policy Research (VEPR) in partnership with Swansea University, United Kingdom. This work was supported by a Research Environment Links, under the Newton Programme Vietnam partnership. The grant is funded by the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and delivered by the British Council.

A report from the project “Online Price and Inflation Nowcasting” conducted by Viet Nam Institute for Economic and Policy Research (VEPR) in partnership with Swansea University, United Kingdom. This work was supported by a Research Environment Links, under the Newton Programme Vietnam partnership. The grant is funded by the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and delivered by the British Council.

A report from the project “Online Price and Inflation Nowcasting” conducted by Viet Nam Institute for Economic and Policy Research (VEPR) in partnership with Swansea University, United Kingdom. This work was supported by a Research Environment Links, under the Newton Programme Vietnam partnership. The grant is funded by the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and delivered by the British Council.

This paper provides an overview of development characteristics of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam over the 2006-2015 period. Employing large-scale data from the Vietnam Enterprise Census, we found that SMEs in Vietnam have experienced different development trends in two separate stages. Before 2010, number of enterprises, number of employees, total capital as well as total revenues of SME sector all enjoyed progressive increase. Since 2011, however, most of them suffered sharp decrease with different extent before showing some positive signs in 2015. Our analysis has also shown that SMEs have increased considerably in quantity but not in quality. In particular, a growing proportion of enterprises in the business sector is either micro- or small-sized; and the number of employees per enterprise has decreased over time. There have been shifts of SME labor and capital from agriculture, forestry, fisheries and manufacturing to services with a considerable number of SMEs operating in less knowledge-intensive service industries. In addition, SMEs have relatively lower business performance compared to large enterprises with respect to labor utilization, return to assets, return to equity, and return to sales. We also provide a literature review on the constraints to the sustainable development of Vietnamese SME sector, as well as review on the international experience of SME development in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

In this context, the 19th National Congress of The Communist Party Of China not only marks five years in power of Xi Jinping, but also opens a new development direction for China in the next 10 years. With a host of crucial targets to fulfill in the next term after the 19th Party Congress, China will surely take more drastic and unpredictable actions. Therefore, it is of significant importance for countries like Viet Nam to keep a close watch on and conduct an in-depth analysis of the 19th National Congress – the first movement for the following years of development.

This paper analyzes the industrial success of the telecommunications industry in Vietnam using developmental rent management analysis (DRMA). The empirical evidence for this study is primarily based on 42 semi-structured interviews with government officials, firm managers, suppliers, workers, and industry experts from 2010 to 2012. DRMA suggests that the industry’s success was based on a number of rent management factors that corrected certain market failures and encouraged significant effort for learning and technology adoption. These factors were fundamentally based on: (1) favorable political supports for rent creation from the state, (2) an effective structure of rent allocation and implementation, and (3) credible incentives and pressures that encouraged industrial upgrading. While each factor by itself was insufficient to ensure the success of the industry, their synthesis was such that Vietnamese telecom operators, in particular Viettel Group, were motivated and compelled to rapidly expand their industrial capability through technical learning and upgrading.

This paper proposes a new mechanism linking technology, gender inequality in education, and fertility in a unified growth model. There are three main components to the mechanism: First, increases in the level of technology not only increase the return to human capital but also reduce women's time in doing housework, leaving women with more time for child care and labor-force participation, since technological progress creates labour-saving products for doing housework. Second, the decreases in women's time devoted to housework in the future make households today invest less in education for their sons in order to invest more education for their daughters because the marginal return to female education is higher than that to male education, therefore, improving the gender equality in education. Third, the better gender equality in education, in turn, accelerates the technological progress. This positive feedback loop generates a demographic transition accompanied with accelerated economic growth.

The issues of development in developing countries are twofold. First, growth and development requires technological upgrading and industrial capability-building. Second, embedded within each developing economy is a rent-seeking society, which operates both formally and informally. This paper assesses each of the two issues in turn by presenting an overview of key contributions in the literature on the institutional economic analysis of technological change, learning, rents, and rent-seeking. It first reviews the neoclassical literature on technology and growth, which was largely derived from Solow’s model on growth and technical change. The following section presents alternative approaches, which challenge Solow’s and others’ assumptions by pointing out that the appropriation of knowledge is neither automatic nor costless. It is in this context that a state’s intervention in the forms of industrial policies is arguably essential for catching up. Next, the paper surveys the theoretical debate on rents and rent-seeking especially in relation to the issue of learning. This includes the notable research of Joseph Stiglitz, Ricardo Hausmann, Dani Rodrik, and Mushtaq Khan. Finally, considerations about the roles of politics and informal institutions, especially the research of Douglas North and colleagues, Ha-Joon Chang, Ali Cheema and Mushtaq Khan, in solving the critical two-fold problem of development are presented. This paper assents to the heterodox economists’ assertion that, under certain conditions, rents could be value enhancing and thus, effective development strategies should take into consideration the creation and management of value-enhancing rents.

We extend the model in Galor and Weil (2000), considering geographical factors, to show that, under some initial condition, an economy may be locked in Malthusian stagnation and it never takes off. Specifically, we show how the interplay of “land”, its “accessibility”, and technology prevents an economy from escaping stagnation.