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Flooding is an emerging problem in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, and is fast becoming a major barrier to its ongoing development. While flooding is presently of nuisance value, there is a growing concern that a combination of rapid urban expansion and climate changes will significantly exacerbate the problem. There has been a trend of population being rapidly accommodated in new urban areas, which are considered highly vulnerable to floods, while the development strategy by the local government still attracts more property investments into the three new districts on the right side of Saigon River. This paper aims to discuss the increase in the number of residences vulnerable to flooding, to underline the need for more appropriate future spatial development. For the vision, an application of compact and resilient theories to strategic planning and management of this city is proposed to reduce vulnerability. This paper also highlights the need to better understand growing vulnerability to floods related to urban expansion over low-lying former wetlands and the more important role of planning spatial development accompanied with transportation investment which can contribute to flooding resilience.

This research uses combined-methods geographical information system (GIS) analysis based on secondary data of flood records, population distributions, property development (with the details of 270 housing projects compiled as part of this research) and flooding simulation. This allows an integrated approach to the theories of urban resilience and compactness to discuss the implication of spatial planning and management in relevance to flooding vulnerability.

The flooding situation in HCMC is an evidence of inappropriate urban expansion leading to increase in flooding vulnerability. Although climate change impacts are obvious, the rapid population growth and associated accommodation development are believed to be the key cause which has not been solved. It was found that the three new emerging districts (District 2, 9 and ThuDuc) are highly vulnerable to floods, but the local government still implements the plan for attracted investments in housing without an integrated flooding management. This is also in line with the development pattern of many coastal cities in Southeast Asia, as economic development can be seen as a driving factor.

The data of property development are diversified from different sources which have been compiled by this research from the basic map of housing investments from a governmental body, the Department of Construction. The number of projects was limited to 270 per over 500 projects, but this still sufficiently supports the evidence of increasing accommodation in new development districts.

HCMC needs neater strategies for planning and management of spatial development to minimize the areas vulnerable to floods: creating more compact spaces in the central areas (Zone 1) protected by the current flooding management system, and offering more resilient spaces for new development areas (Zone 2), by improving the resilience of transportation system. Nevertheless, a similar combination of compact spaces and resilient spaces in emerging districts could also be incorporated into the existing developments, and sustainable drainage systems or underground water storage in buildings could also be included in the design to compensate for the former wetlands lost.

This paper highlights the need to better understand growing vulnerability to floods related to urban expansion over low-lying former wetlands and emphasizes the more important role of planning spatial development accompanied with transportation investment which can contribute to flooding resilience. Coastal cities in southeast countries need to utilize the former-land, whereas feasibility of new land for urban expansion needs to be thoroughly considered under risk of natural disasters.

A combination of compact spaces with improved urban resilience is an alternative approach to decrease the flooding risk beyond that of traditional resistant systems and underlines the increasingly important role of urban planning and management to combat the future impacts of floods.

The authors estimate the reduction of electricity poverty in Vietnam. The essential argument is that human development is about subjective feeling as much as technology and income.

The authors use a self-reported satisfaction indicator as complementary to objective indicators based on national household surveys from 2008 to 2018.

In 2010, the fraction of households with access to electricity was over 96%. However, over 24% declared their electricity use did not meet their needs. Since 2014, the satisfaction rate is around 97%, even if 25% of the households used less than 50 kWh/month. Today there is electricity for all in Vietnam, but electricity bills weigh more and more in the budget of households.

The subjective energy poverty measure allows better international statistics: unlike poverty or needs-based criteria, self-assessed satisfaction of needs compares across income levels and climates.

Inequalities in electricity use among Vietnamese households decreased during the 2008–2018 period, but are not greater than inequalities in income, contrary to the findings of Son and Yoon (2020).

Engineering and econometric objectivist approaches dominate the literature on sustainability monitoring. Out of 232 sustainable development goal (SDG) indicators, only two are subjective. Yet the findings show that subjective indicators tell a different part of the story. Access is not grid building, but the meaningful provision of electricity to satisfy the needs.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate how higher tax on tobacco would influence output and employment in Vietnam.

The authors used micro-simulation techniques proposed by Walbeeck (2010). Both national data (from Input–Output Table) and household data (Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey) were utilized.

The results showed that any increase in the excise tax for tobacco would have positive net impacts on both national output and employment. The tobacco industry would not be significantly affected due to its small contribution to national economy and employment. More importantly, money released from reduced tobacco consumption would be reallocated to other goods and services, and thus outputs and jobs in nontobacco sectors would increase.

The key limitation of this study was due to unavailability of updated data, especially Input–Output Table as well as household living standard survey.

This study concluded that government should increase tax on cigarette along with a well-planned roadmap to avoid unexpected consequences on income and employment of laborers in this sector.

This study replicated a popular approach in order to verify an important government policy (i.e. effect of tax on tobacco on output and employment) under Vietnamese context.

Mobile location-based service (m-LBS) seems like a new class of personalized service due to location positioning technologies. This work aims to investigate consumer readiness (RED) toward m-LBS based on integrating pull effect- and push effect-related factors into the technology acceptance model (TAM).

An online survey collected data from 423 participants, and the research framework was analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results divulge that consumer RED is determined by TAM antecedents, including usefulness (USE) and ease of use (EOU). EOU motivates USE in m-LBS. Regarding pull effect-related factors, absorptive capacity (ABC) is the strongest positive factor influencing consumer RED to use m-LBS, followed by technology willingness (TWI) and innovativeness (INN). Moreover, INN, trust (TRU) and perceived risk (RIS) significantly influence USE and EOU.

This work endeavors to explicate customer RED toward m-LBS by incorporating some meaningful pull effect-related dimensions (i.e. ABC, TWI and INN) and pushing effect-related dimensions (i.e. RIS) into crucial antecedents rooted in TAM. Thus, the findings assist practitioners in developing marketing strategies by boosting pull effects and controlling push effects on customer engagement in m-LBS.

Agricultural systems in Mekong Delta have transformed to cope with climate change. Various researches pointed out that integrated agriculture-aquaculture (IAA) farming systems (i.e., rice-shrimp, rice-fish…) emerged as potential climate adaptive practices. However, limited studies are attempting to assess the sustainability of these agricultural practices. Therefore, it is essential to assess whether or not these systems will be sustainable in the context of climate change and what can be done to make it sustainable. The present study conducted the sustainability assessment of the rice-shrimp system to identify potential areas for improvement as well as policy implication to increase resilience and adaptation of coastal IAA system which could contribute to the understanding of other coastal agricultural deltas around the globe.

This study used a quantitative approach including the assessment protocol of van Asselt et al. (2014), the assessment framework of Vanloon et al. (2005), and the MCA methodology to flexibly and holistically assess the sustainability level of agricultural systems.

Results concluded that rice-shrimp systems have the potential to improve livelihood, food security, and adaptation of coastal farmers. Major improvements should be considered for productivity, efficiency, and equity themes, while minor improvements can be made for stability, durability, and compatibility themes.

This research could be used as a guideline for sustainability assessment in a context-specific case study of IAA, which showed a potential for the application of other climate-smart IAAs in similar contexts around the globe.

This study examines the influence of stock liquidity on stock price crash risk and the moderating role of institutional blockholders in Vietnam’s stock market.

Crash risk is measured by the negative coefficient of skewness of firm-specific weekly returns (NCSKEW) and the down-to-up volatility of firm-specific weekly stock returns (DUVOL). Liquidity is measured by adjusted Amihud illiquidity. The two-stage least squares method is used to address endogeneity issues.

Using firm-level data from Vietnam, we find that crash risk increases with stock liquidity. The relationship is stronger in firms owned by institutional blockholders. Moreover, intensive selling by institutional blockholders in the future will positively moderate the relationship between liquidity and crash risk.

Since stock liquidity could exacerbate crash risk through institutional blockholder trading, firm managers should avoid bad news accumulation and practice timely information disclosures. Investors should be mindful of the risk associated with liquidity and blockholder trading.

We contribute to the literature by showing that the activities of blockholders could partly explain the relationship between liquidity and crash risk. High liquidity encourages blockholders to exit upon receiving private bad news.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of investor attention on stock market activity.

The authors employed the Google Search Volume (GSV) Index, a direct and non-traditional proxy for investor attention.

The results indicate a strong correlation between GSV and trading volume – a traditional measure of attention – proving the new measure’s reliability. In addition, market-wide attention increases both stock illiquidity and volatility, whereas company-level attention shows mixed results, driving illiquidity and volatility in both directions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, Nguyen and Pham’s (2018) study has been the only previous study identifying investor attention in Vietnam by using GSV as a proxy and examining the impacts of broad search terms about the macroeconomy on the stock market as a whole – on stock indices’ movements. The paper will contribute to this by quantifying GSV impacts on each stock individually.