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This essay examines a common assertion among middle-class shoppers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, that place of manufacture, rather than brand markers, largely determines the quality of goods. For shoppers in Ho Chi Minh City, unity of place, people, raw materials, and trade secrets at the source – a corporation’s home country – is essential to the production of high quality goods. This stands in contrast to the brand logic through which corporations outsource their production presumably without compromising product quality. By privileging production sites over brands, shoppers in Ho Chi Minh City interpret the recent increase of famous foreign brand name goods in Vietnam as an increase of domestic, rather than foreign goods.

Reforms of the Vietnamese economy have been widely credited for stabilizing the value of the state-issued currency in the marketplace. Nevertheless, how people evaluate the Vietnamese dong as a symbolic form can be read as a symptom of shifting economic and political forces, above all in Ho Chi Minh City, a city associated with commerce. Through three ethnographic cases – the introduction of “big money,” the scarcity of “new money” in 2002, and the campaign to build Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), this paper analyzes the contentious politics around symbolic exchange that shape confidence in Vietnamese currency.

Luxury and communism are perceived to be ideologically incompatible values. Prior to the end of the Cold War, luxury tourism and socialist economies had an accommodating relationship and were rationalised at the national level for foreign exchange revenues, showcasing national development in some instances and finally promoting leisure and political education. However, contemporary scholarship on political ideology and luxury tourism is limited given changes in the political and tourism domain over the last two decades. The start of luxury travel and increasing private promotion in Vietnam comes at a time where the communist regime is hurriedly developing the economy at a breakneck speed. Key cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have become the forefront of luxury travel for Vietnam. Luxury malls, fine dining and five-star hotel resorts have sprung over the years in tandem with Doi Moi (economic restructuring). Tourism literature has seldom ventured into regime politics and luxury tourism. Using a historical approach, the chapter traces the preamble of luxury tourism in the age of Vietnam's modernity. A critical assessment of contemporary luxury tourism in Vietnam reveals a favourable relationship with socialist principles.

Adequate, reliable, and efficient urban infrastructure systems (UIS) are fundamental to sustainable development, social mobility, and economic vitality. As communities continuously rely on basic infrastructure services to support their daily communal functions, major components of UIS are subject to heavy use, and thus rapidly deteriorate over time; hence, it is critical that efficient infrastructure management strategies practices are in place. As current strategies remain confronted with various limitations including adaptability to changing conditions, lack of public engagement, and cost-effectiveness, this study explores social media data mining as an approach to revitalise and support current urban infrastructure monitoring strategies by extracting valuable insights from public opinion. Twitter messages or ‘Tweets’ pertaining to public infrastructure in The Philippines were collected and analysed to identify recurring issues in public infrastructure, emerging topics in public discussions, and the overall perception of the public on infrastructure services. This study presents a topic model that extracts dominant topics from aggregated social media data and a sentiment analysis model that determines public opinion sentiment in relation to different urban infrastructure components. The findings of this study highlight the potential of social media data mining to surpass the limits of conventional data collection techniques and the importance of public opinion as a key driver for a more user-involved decision-making in infrastructure management and as an important social aspect that can be utilised to support planning and response strategies in routine maintenance, preservation, and improvement of UIS.

Claims and disputes are often unavoidable in the construction industry due to its unique and complex characteristics involving the massive investment of capital, lengthy project duration, and multiple project stakeholders. This chapter intends to identify the critical construction claims attributes, compare the perceptions of major stakeholders on different claim attributes, and investigate the contrast of the top five claim attributes between this study and previous ones. The literature review resulted in 48 claim attributes responsible for the construction project schedule delays. These attributes were then presented to Vietnam construction industry (VCI) practitioners in the form of a questionnaire survey. Data analysis was done based on the collected 113 qualified samples. Relative importance index (RII) was applied to determine the ranking of claim attributes. The results were that the top five causes of claims, that is, payment delays, mistakes by contractor during construction stage, delays in work progress by the contractor, financial failure of the contractor, and frequently changing requirements by the owner, lead to the schedule delays in VCI. These findings can assist the local industry practitioners and foreign companies seeking a share in the VCI market in understanding the causes of construction claims comprehensively and formulating the countermeasures to minimise their impacts and hence reduce the unnecessary losses and raise the likelihood of success as well as maintain sustainable relationships among stakeholders.

This chapter describes how public sector reform (PSR) became important following the ‘Doi Moi’ (renovation) programme in 1986. Restructuring of state-owned sector was regarded as crucial for ensuring the quality of economic growth, and the Vietnamese government (www.chinhphu.vn/portal/page/portal/English) put considerable effort in PSR. The 8th Party Congress (1996) emphasized the urgent need for a more transparent, capable and modern public sector, including efforts to improve law-making process and capacity, reducing burdensome bureaucracy, fighting corruption, increasing leadership by senior officials and improving public service delivery. The government specifies the national PSR Master programme, and the Ministry of Home Affairs coordinates its implementation among ministries, central agencies and provincial governments. Local political leaders (party leaders) determine reforms based on guidelines of the party and government. The author writes that in spite of ambitious public service reform programmes and some positive achievements, the quality of public sector remains poor. The professional capacity of civil service is low, pay is low, corruption is high and processes and structures seem ill-fitted for the market economy. Reform scope is too broad, the capacity of public agencies and civil servants is limited and existing monitoring, evaluation and reporting systems are weak. In some successes, leaders use appointment and promotion to encourage lower level to implement reforms and training to increase understanding. They believe that Vietnamese leadership has become less proactive and vigorous in practicing or embracing bold reform experiments.

This study looked at how Vietnam, a developing country, in South East Asia has systemically dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic on a national level with remarkable success. This study delved into the approaches taken by Vietnam in pre-mediating the influx of COVID-19 from interlopers into the country and controlling its spread within the confines of the nation. This study examined the steps taken by Vietnam. The quick actions of the government have instilled confidence in their citizens and promoted greater internal travel mobility within the Vietnam, thus helping the local tourism industry to remain vibrant and competitive. Unlike other countries, which have been severely affected by the COVID-19 virus, Vietnam is poised for a head start in its recovery.

Vietnam started significant transition policy since 1986 with the introduction of extensive policy of Doi Moi process. The transition from a centrally planned economy toward market-oriented economy has brought some significant results; however Vietnam has until recently stood out as a success story among the transitional economies from a developmental perspective. This requires further investigation of other factors relating to the viability assumption of neoclassical economics. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between corporate governance and firm value in Vietnam, a small and open neo-transitional economy. The result suggests a positive relationship of board size and the value of a firm, but it is not significant. The result also shows a lack of significant negative relationship of other two independent corporate governance variables (shareholder concentration and CEO duality) and the value of a firm. However, to some extent, too high shareholder concentration and CEO duality tend to have negative impacts to the firm value. Other control variables such as price-to-book value ratio and return on total assets have significant and positive impacts on the value of a firm, while the market capitalization has a negative relationship with the value of a firm.