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This study aims to develop a benchmarking model with productivity, management, and sustainability indicators (PMS), measure the performance of furniture firms in Vietnam, explore the causes of performance gaps, and identify the barriers and factors of benchmarking practice.

The article uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. Literature review, exploratory interviews and a grounded-theory process are employed to develop a benchmarking framework and identify performance gaps, barriers and factors of benchmarking practice. The PMS benchmarking model and quantitative analysis are utilized to assess performance indicators.

The study proposes the PMS benchmarking model and measures performance indicators of furniture firms. The sources of performance gaps are explored as design, material supply, the economy of scale, market, management systems and openness. Benchmarking practice encounters barriers of difficult indicators, unsuitable firms, insufficient benchmarking knowledge, reluctance to share data, unavailable and unreliable data, and weak engagement. Benchmarking practice is determined by core factors: leader; internal factors: systems, engagement, strategy, scope, culture; external factors: customers, suppliers, associations, support, competition.

Firms could learn benchmarking indicators and the causes of these gaps to improve their performance. When implementing a benchmarking study, scholars and practitioners need to pay attention to barriers and factors of the benchmarking practice to ensure effective results.

This study develops the PMS benchmarking model and estimates performance indicators in an emerging country with the performance gap justification. It provides readers with benchmarking barriers with solutions and success factors of benchmarking practice.

This study aims to identify the relationships between the electronic word of mouth (eWOM), brand image (Brand) and online purchase intention (INT) of young customers during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic period.

The covariance-based SEM and the multi-group invariance analysis (MGA) were applied to investigate the proposed model with the data collected via an online survey during the fourth wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam.

The results showed that eWOM quantity (eQuan) has a significant positive effect on eWOM credibility (eC) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, whereas Brand positively partially mediates the relationship between eQuan and INT, this construct plays a positively fully mediating role in the relationship between eC and INT. Finally, the results indicated that there is no significant difference in the invariance indicators related to the gender of respondents.

This study has some contributions not only to the theoretical framework for understanding the online purchase behaviour of young customers in the pandemic context, but also to the practical implications of how to use different dimensions of eWOM accordingly to enhance a company's brand image in the online business environment.

Emerging economies have been highlighted as an important growth source of the global economy. However, this group of countries has not received enough academic attention yet. Therefore, this study aims to identify the impact of research and development (R&D) expenditure on economic growth in emerging economies.

The theoretical framework of the production function is applied to quantitatively analyse the impact of R&D expenditure on economic growth with a sample of 29 emerging economies in the period between 1996 and 2019.

The panel cointegration test confirms the existence of long-run cointegration relationships between economic growth and independent variables in these emerging economies. Besides, the estimated results show that the national R&D expenditure has positive effects on economic growth from both direct and interaction dimensions. This evidence has filled the empirical research gap in the R&D-growth nexus in the case of emerging economies. Finally, while gross capital and education have positive impacts on growth, corruption has a harmful effect on economic growth in these countries.

The results highlight that policymakers should enhance R&D expenditure and R&D activities as the key national development strategy. The investment in R&D not only helps emerging economies avoid the middle-income trap but also pushes these countries to successfully join the group of developed countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to examine the impact of R&D expenditure on economic growth with a homogeneous sample of emerging economies. The results are obviously helpful for policymakers to use R&D as the key development strategy for supporting economic growth in emerging economies in the future.

The moderating role of situational context in the effects of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) on online purchase intention through brand image has found sparse empirical support. This study thus aims to examine whether situational context affects the direction and strength of the relationships between aspects of eWOM and brand image that lead to online purchase intention.

To extend the existing research, the authors tested the model using a sample of 546 online shoppers during the fourth wave of COVID-19 in Ho Chi Minh City. Specifically, the testing of the direct relationships and the mediating role of brand image occurred using measurement and structural models. The authors then created a moderated mediation model to examine the moderating role of situational context. Furthermore, the authors probed the interactions by identifying changes in the relationships from eWOM to online purchase intention through a brand image at different levels of situational context.

Without situational context’s moderating effect, brand image positively partially mediated the influence of either eWOM credibility or quantity on intention. Situational context’s moderating effect then explains why high- versus low-level disease-avoidance customers seek less eWOM credibility and more eWOM quantity to develop brand images and shape their intentions.

The findings have theoretical implications for understanding the pressure of disease avoidance on customers’ online purchase intentions. Among the practical implications of the research are tactics for profit and non-profit purposes.

In response to COVID-19 global outbreaks, Canada, and Australia, two favored destinations by international students, as the contexts of this essay, have enacted different international education policies, which will be investigated through the narratives. The authors discuss transnationality and mobility as key terms in the internationalization of higher education (HE) studies through their experiences as three Vietnamese doctoral students in Canada and Australia. Transnationality is attended through a narrative of a Vietnamese returnee struggling with bringing unfamiliar knowledge of gender and sex education from the West into a Vietnamese HE context. Mobility is unpacked through stories of a Vietnamese doctoral student in Canada stuck in Vietnam due to the COVID-19 despite inviting policies from the Canadian government to international students. This experience is connected to another Vietnamese student’s experience in Australia about a controversial act to discourage international students from staying in Australia if they cannot support themselves during the pandemic. The authors’ stories are created and retold personally for introspective and contemplative reflections on what the authors have experienced and offer considerations for how transnationality and mobility in international and comparative education could be understood through education, equity, and inclusion.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the barriers for sustainability reporting practices in five different countries in the Indo-Pacific region.

This paper uses surveys and semi-structured interviews to explore the main barriers faced by the managers of listed companies in undertaking sustainability reporting.

The findings of the study reveal that the main barriers for sustainability reporting are attributable to lack of knowledge and understanding, additional cost involved, time constraints, lack of awareness and education in sustainability reporting and a lack of initiatives from government. These vary between three groups of countries: those with more developed reporting, those with less developed reporting and those with strong cultural constraints to reporting.

This study adapts Lewin’s field theory and three-step model of change to be applied to group dynamics at a broader country level rather than at an organisational level.

The barriers identified in this paper are important for reporting companies to come up with strategies to mitigate existing barriers and for regulatory authorities to provide subsidies and other incentives to supplement the efforts of these listed companies. Also, non-reporting companies could use the findings as a measure of cautiousness to set up the necessary processes to have a smooth sustainability reporting process in their companies.

This is one of the few studies that explore the barriers for sustainability reporting in five countries in the Indo-Pacific region.

This paper aims to examine the levels of integrated reporting disclosure alignment in annual reports by listed firms in Vietnam and the factors influencing these disclosure levels.

Drawing on a sample of 200 listed firms in Vietnam in 2017, the authors constructed a disclosure index based on the content of the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) Framework. Using this index, the study measures the extent to which Vietnamese listed firms’ annual reports include the content elements required by the integrated reporting (IR) Framework. The study performs ordinary least square regression to investigate the influencing factors.

The study documents that, on average, Vietnamese listed firms disclose about 43% of the information required by the IIRC Framework. The disclosure levels are positively associated with manufacturing firms, board independence, foreign ownership, government ownership, audit quality and firm size.

Integrated reports have been widely adopted in many countries, but it is still a new issue in Vietnam. This is the first paper providing some insights into the inclusion of the content elements required by the IR Framework by listed firms in Vietnam. It also contributes to the disclosure literature by providing empirical evidence on the factors influencing these disclosure levels. Deriving from the findings, the authors offer recommendations for policymakers on the issue of regulating and implementing IR in Vietnam.

This paper aims to propose a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) to assess the response from the household sector to monetary policy shocks through the consumption function. Moreover, the transmission from monetary policy to household consumption and income distribution is experimented with through the vector autoregression (VAR) model.

In this study, the authors used the maximum likelihood estimation to estimate the DSGE and VAR models with the sample from 1996Q1 to the end of 2021Q4 (104 observations).

The DSGE model’s results show that the response of the household sector is as expected in the theory: a monetary policy shock occurs that increases the policy interest rate by 0.29%, leading to a decrease in consumer spending of about 0.041%, the shock fades after one year. Estimates from the VAR model give similar results: a monetary policy shock narrows income inequality after about 2–3 quarters and this process tends to slow down in the long run.

Based on the research results, the authors propose policy implications for the SBV to achieve the goal of price stability, and stabilizing the macro-economic environment in Vietnam.

The findings of the study have theoretical contributions and empirical scientific evidence showing the effectiveness of the implementation of the SBV’s monetary policy in the context of macro-instability, namely: flexibility, caution and coordination of different measures promptly.

Static converters generate current harmonics in power grids. For numerous studies, analytical frequency modeling is preferred to carry out their harmonic modeling in the context of sizing by optimization. However, a design by optimization has to consider other constraints, e.g. modeling constraints and operating constraints. In this way, this paper aims to focus on applying an analytical frequency modeling on the sizing by optimization of an aircraft electrical power channel.

The paper aims to size a multiphysical system by optimization. In this way, the sizing of an aircraft electrical power channel by optimization has been carried out. The models of all the channel components are analytical. Specifically, the frequency model of the power electronics is based on Tran et al. (2016) and is made of equalities and inequalities. Due to this modeling choice, the optimization satisfies hundreds of constraints, such as modeling constraints and static converter operating constraints. Furthermore, transient constraints are only verified after optimization.

The difficulty is the modeling of the system by taking into account nonlinear implicit equations having several solutions. A solution is the addition of inequality constraints to the model to guide the implicit solving. Furthermore, this greatly helps the optimization algorithm to find the good operating mode of the static converter, at steady state. This aspect is indispensable to validate the sizing model.

The number of the configurations per operating period of the static converters is defined a priori and limited.

The analytical model for the sizing is formulated as a constrained optimization problem. Its solving and the sizing by optimization are carried out by the same optimization algorithm.