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This study investigates the optimum size for manufacturing firms and the impact of subcontracting on firms' likelihood of achieving their optimal scale in Vietnam.

Using data from the enterprise census in 2017 and 2021, the paper first estimates the production function to identify the optimum firm size for manufacturing firms and then, applies the logit model to investigate factors associated with the optimal firm size.

The study reveals that medium-sized firms exhibit the highest level of productivity. Nevertheless, a consistent trend emerges, indicating that nearly 90% of manufacturing firms in Vietnam operated below their optimal scale in both 2017 and 2021. An analysis of the impact of subcontracting on firms' likelihood to achieve their optimal scale emphasizes its crucial role, especially for foreign firms, exerting an influence nearly five times greater than that of the judiciary system.

The paper's findings offer crucial policy implications, suggesting that initiatives aimed at enhancing the overall productivity of the manufacturing sector should prioritise facilitating contract arrangements to encourage firms to reach their optimal size. These insights are also valuable for other countries with comparable firm size distributions.

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the relationship between firm size and productivity as well as the role of subcontracting in firms' ability to reach their optimal scale in a country with a right-skewed distribution of firm sizes.

The literature on warehouse performance assessments is mainly focussed on the efficiency and effectiveness of an action or activity due to customer demand and tailored fulfilment, with less attention being given to the performance measurement of each function of the warehouse and its overall productivity. Therefore, this study was aimed at revising the key warehouse performance metrics to a set of productivity measurement indicators that can be adopted internationally for benchmarking productivity performance.

A literature review and semi-structured survey questionnaire were used for this study. The importance of warehouse productivity performance was reviewed to revamp the measurement indicators. Through the use of a directed content analysis and descriptive analysis, an extensive study was carried out to analyze existing warehouse productivity indicators.

The findings of this study provide comprehensive references for practitioners and academicians for improving the classification of productivity measurements from existing key performance metrics for warehousing. Also, this paper highlights the warehouse resources related to the respective warehouse operation activities.

The study was limited to productivity performance indicators adapted from Staudt et al. (2015). Furthermore, the samples for this study comprised Malaysian academicians and practitioners in the related field. The findings can be adapted on a global scale as this study implemented general warehouse operation processes.

Consequently, the contributions of this study are that it provides relevant benchmarks for key productivity performance indicators in the warehousing sector that has worldwide applicability and the developed model provides a conceptual platform from which further theoretical and empirical developments can be carried out.

This study aims to investigate the impacts of bank capital requirements on the performance and risk of the emerging economy, i.e. Bangladeshi banking sector.

The study applies an unbalanced panel data which comprises 30 banks yielding a total of 413 bank-year observations over the period 2000 to 2015.

Using generalized methods of moments, the empirical results of this research reveal that bank capital is positively and significantly impressive on bank performance, whereas negatively and significantly impact on risk. The study also finds the inverse relationship between risk and performance in both the performance and risk equations. The results also indicate that there is a persistence of performance and risk from one year to the next year.

This is the unique investigation on Bangladeshi bank industry that considers the simultaneous effect of bank capital requirements on risk and performance. Therefore, it is predicted that the empirical evidence of this research shows policy implications to the regulatory authority of Bangladeshi banking industry to determine relevant policies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether cross-country differences in pensionable age explain such differences in economic activity of people at near-retirement age.

The empirical study uses regression models for macro-panel encompassing 21 European countries in the period 2008–2014.

Empirical results indicate that pensionable age is a determinant of cross-country differences in employment rate in the near-retirement age group, and less a factor differentiating average effective retirement age. It turns out that other factors matter, including salaries and wages as percentage of GDP (treated as a proxy for the occupational composition of populations across the countries studied), self-employment, participation in education and training, or self-perceived health.

The problem of economic activity at the near-retirement age is complex and cannot be limited to legal regulations concerning pensionable age. The policy aiming at stimulating the economic activity of the near-elderly should include actions on many sides including labour market, pension system, education, training, or health care.

The results complement studies based on the single-country approach and demonstrate that pensionable age does not account for cross-country differences in terms of average effective age of retirement when controlling for other factors. Moreover, factors differentiating effective retirement age and employments rates across countries studied are not similar.

The paper aims to enrich previous findings for an emerging banking industry such as Vietnam, reporting the difference between the parametric and nonparametric methods when measuring cost efficiency. The purpose of the study is to assess the consistency in issuing policies to improve the cost efficiency of Vietnamese commercial banks.

The cost efficiency of banks is assessed through the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Next, five tests are conducted in succession to analyze the differences in cost efficiency measured by these two methods, including the distribution, the rankings, the identification of the best and worst banks, the time consistency and the determinants of efficiency frontier. The data are collected from the annual financial statements of Vietnamese banks during 2005–2017.

The results show that the cost efficiency obtained under the SFA models is more consistent than under the DEA models. However, the DEA-based efficiency scores are more similar in ranking order and stability over time. The inconsistency in efficiency characteristics under two different methods reminds policy makers and bank administrators to compare and select the appropriate efficiency frontier measure for each stage and specific economic conditions.

This paper shows the need to control for heterogeneity over banking groups and time as well as for random noise and outliers when measuring the cost efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to measure TFP growth and job reallocation in the Vietnamese manufacturing industry after the Doimoi period.

The study uses firm-level panel data from Vietnam’s annual enterprise survey data for 2000–2016 period in the Vietnamese manufacturing industry using Olley–Pakes static and dynamic productivity decomposition methods.

The aggregate productivity estimated from the WRDG method increased 2.323 percent, of which over 40 percent is due to the reallocation toward more productive firms. Olley–Pakes dynamic decomposition according to ownership, scale and industry shows that the contribution of private and state-owned firms and the contribution of small and medium firms and large firms to the TFP growth are 133, −33 percent, 58.56 and 41.44 percent, respectively. The within-firm productivity and net entry components are the main reasons for TFP growth rather than reallocation. The results show that the composition of the aggregate TFPs, estimated from WRDG, OP, LP and ACF, is correlated very high (over 80 percent) except for net entry components.

The major limitation of this study is that the authors compute an aggregate productivity index using actual employment-based shares (still misallocation in labor), rather than optimal employment-based shares (no misallocation in labor).

Job reallocation between industries is attracting attention in developing countries, especially transition economies. However, knowledge about job reallocation among industries is limited. This paper assesses the level of job reallocation among private and state-owned firms, small and medium firms and large firms in Vietnam.

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel general mathematical model to find the optimal product mix of commercial graphite products, which has a complex production process with alternative sub-processes in the graphite mining production process.

The network optimization was adopted to model the complex graphite mining production process through the optimal allocation of raw graphite, byproducts, and saleable products with comparable sub-processes, which has different processing capacities and costs. The model was tested on a selected graphite manufacturing company, and the optimal graphite product mix was determined through the selection of the optimal production process. In addition, sensitivity and scenario analyses were carried out to accommodate uncertainties and to facilitate further managerial decisions.

The selected graphite mining company mines approximately 400 metric tons of raw graphite per month to produce ten types of graphite products. According to the optimum solution obtained, the company should produce only six graphite products to maximize its total profit. In addition, the study demonstrated how to reveal optimum managerial decisions based on optimum solutions.

This study has made a significant contribution to the graphite manufacturing industry by modeling the complex graphite mining production process with a network optimization technique that has yet to be addressed at this level of detail. The sensitivity and scenario analyses support for further managerial decisions.