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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this literature on developing countries by investigating the determinants of job satisfaction in Vietnam where the economics literature on this issue is virtually non-existent. The authors also contribute to the literature on income comparison by extending beyond the within-firm co-worker income comparison.

The authors estimate a generalized order logit model for job satisfaction as statistical tests suggest that the parallel-lines assumption, which is often invoked in previous studies using the standard logit model, does not hold.

For Vietnam, the authors find that absolute and relative incomes as well as human resource practices such as efficiency wage and training policy have an impact on workers’ satisfaction. Workers in the foreign direct investment (FDI) sectors behave a bit differently from their peers in the domestic sector.

Taking advantage of a unique matched employer–employee data set collected in 2008 by the North-South Institute (Canada) and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, the authors are able to investigate the impact of a number of important job characteristics on job satisfaction such as absolute and reference incomes, wage policy, training plan for workers, union membership and job position, and, at the same time, to disentangle the possible differences in job satisfaction of workers in domestic vs FDI firms.

This research identifies the level of labor misallocation in Vietnamese manufacturing sector for the period 2005–2019. The paper also examines the effects of labor misallocation on productivity in Vietnamese manufacturing firms controlled by industry- and firm-level factors.

The level of labor misallocation and efficiency gains in total factor productivity (TFP) are assessed using Vietnam's annual enterprise survey data for the period 2005–2019 and Hsieh and Klenow (2009) productivity decomposition framework.

The results indicate four main points. Firstly, labor misallocation tends to increase from 2005 to 2019. Secondly, labor misallocation by firm ownership and technology level is found to be highest in state-owned enterprise and low-tech industries, whereas foreign direct investment and high-tech firms have lowest labor misallocation. Labor misallocation in small- and medium-sized enterprises is higher than in large-sized enterprises and is equivalent to overall sample. Thirdly, labor misallocation decreases productivity in manufacturing firms. The firm-level factors such as bigger technology gap, external capital, firm scale and poor liquidity ratio decrease productivity in manufacturing firms. Whereas firm-level factors such as Vietnam's accession to the WTO, reasonable corporate tax structure, capital intensity, human capital and firm age increase productivity of manufacturing firms. The industry-level factors such as FDI horizontal, forward and supply backward spillovers promote productivity from foreign firms to domestic ones. Meanwhile, only backward linkages reduce productivity of firms. Finally, by difference-in-differences (DID) method, the result indicates foreign firms have higher average labor productivity than domestic firms before or after Vietnam's accession to the WTO. After joining WTO, the average labor productivity of foreign firms is increased by 854 million VND while the average labor productivity of domestic firms is increased by 895 million VND. The DID between the two groups (domestic firms and foreign firms) before and after Vietnam's accession to WTO is 41 million dong.

The main limitation of the study is that the market is assumed perfectly competitive. The model focuses on selective factors affecting labor productivity.

The focus of many previous international research papers was generally to look at the level of labor misallocation in developed countries. However, knowledge about labor misallocation is limited, particularly in the context of developing countries. This paper examines the level of labor misallocation by region, ownership, level of technology and firm size on productivity and the effect of misallocation on productivity in Vietnamese manufacturing firms.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2021-0552.

This analysis examines the relationship between corruption and firm productivity in Vietnam.

The authors apply the system generalized method of moments estimation approach on a panel dataset constructed from comprehensive enterprise surveys covering all the sectors over the 2011–2020 period.

The results confirm a non-linear relationship between corruption and firm productivity. Where corruption is severe, leaving corruption alone tends to benefit firm productivity because efforts to control corruption are likely to cause greater delays. In less corrupt provinces, corruption appears to harm firm productivity while efforts to control corruption provide significant productivity gains. This U-shaped relationship is confirmed for small firms and those in the private sector sub-samples. Intriguingly, this study reveals that the U-shaped relationship does not apply to micro, medium, large firms, state-owned firms and foreign-invested firms because corruption is found to have no significant impact on productivity among these sub-samples. Changes in regulations after 2014 toward promoting a transparent business environment are shown to foster the positive impact of lowering corruption on firm productivity.

This study suggests that lowering corruption is beneficial for firm productivity at the micro level. However, where corruption is severe, monitoring corruption alone is likely to cause adverse effects on productivity due to increased bureaucratic delays. Institutional reforms might play an important role in leveraging the effects of lowering corruption on productivity in highly corrupt areas.

This paper sheds new light on the relationship between corruption and firm productivity in the broad existing literature and especially in the limited number of studies for Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the current situation of buying external technology in Vietnamese manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from 2013 to 2018. This paper also aims to examine the effect of buying technology on employment and environmental quality in Vietnam.

External technology purchase and its impact on employment and environmental quality are taken from the Vietnam annual enterprise survey and the using technology in production survey from 2013 to 2018. The estimation is based on a feasible generalized least squares method.

This study finds that external technology purchase in manufacturing SMEs increases the employment rate in the industries. External technology purchase in Vietnamese manufacturing SMEs also increases the level of environmental pollution. This is a negative side of purchasing technology for production because if the technology used is old, outdated and of poor quality, it will increase environmental pollution. In addition, the growth in employment increases air pollution. This shows that purchasing advanced technology selectively helps to increase the employment rate in Vietnamese manufacturing sector, which is followed by a positive impact on environmental quality.

The limitation of this study is that the research period was only investigated from 2013 to 2018 because the General Statistics Office of Vietnam no longer surveys the dataset about using technology in production surveys after 2018. This study has been conducted at the firm level, so results cannot be easily extended to the macroeconomic level, also taking into account the data limitations in terms of sector coverage.

This paper provides necessary policy recommendations for the government and manufacturing SMEs to solve negative technology issues related to the labour market and air quality in Vietnam. The results are expected to help policymakers in Vietnam propose appropriate national science and technology programmes towards sustainable development in the coming decades.

This paper focuses on assessing the effects of buying external technology by Vietnamese small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises on employment and air quality.

This paper examines the effects of sub-national union coverage on the youth's labor market outcomes.

In the context of the private business sector in Vietnam, this study link individual labor market data with union coverage at provincial level in the period 2013–2016 to investigate the effects of sub-national union coverage on the youth's labor market outcomes. Contingent on the outcome variable, we use the OLS and probit model that control for diverse individual characteristics, year- and industry-fixed effects, and particularly control for selection bias in the labor market.

The empirical results show that the union coverage is positively associated with a wide range of the youth's labor market outcomes, including employment status, wage rate, work hour, and job formality. Also, the coverage is complementary to individual labor contract in determining the youth's wage rate.

Our empirical results indicate positive associations between union coverage and the youth's multi-dimensional labor market outcomes, which contribute to this young age cohort's smooth school-to-work transition, provided that the role of trade union is challenged both in developing and developed countries.

This study provides an in-depth study on the interplay between trade union and the youth's labor market outcomes that contributes to the literature of labor market institutions and youth employment policies in a dynamic transitional economy of Vietnam.

This article analyzes the impact of social insurance on firm performance by obtaining evidence from Vietnamese small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The method employed in the research is the generalized method of moments for testing hypotheses of data collected from the General Statistics Office of Vietnam.

The results show that social insurance contributions can enhance firm performance in three dimensions: return on equity (ROE), labor productivity and total factor productivity (TFP). In addition, financial leverage, firm size, the average wage of workers and fixed assets have an impact on the social insurance costs of these companies.

This article provides a novel explanation of the contribution of social insurance to firm performance. In particular, social insurance contribution not only increases labor productivity but also boosts the growth of the TFP of companies. In addition, the article points out that taking care of the benefits of employees is a valuable investment of companies. These are the unique contributions of the paper to the literature on the economic impact of social insurance.

This paper investigates the dynamic patterns of Vietnam’s comparative advantage in the context of ASEAN. Using the Galtonian regression method and the Markov transition probability matrices for data from 1997 to 2008, we find the following: Firstly, commodity groups with a weak comparative advantage improved their competitiveness, whereas those groups with a strong comparative advantage saw it decline, indicating a convergence of their comparative advantages. Secondly, in terms of intra-distribution dynamics, industries with no initial comparative advantage (Class a) and those with a strong initial comparative advantage (Class d) showed a high degree of persistence, suggesting a low degree of mobility in the trade patterns for Classes a and d. Thirdly, mineral resource-intensive products showed a high degree of export specialization, whereas other product categories showed a high degree of export diversification. Fourthly, all commodity groups showed a downward trend in the degree of specialization. Finally, Vietnam’s exports were dominated by unskilled labor-intensive products and agricultural resource-intensive products, reflecting the validity of Heckscher-Ohlin model. As a result of the country’s trade liberalization, the patterns of Vietnam’s comparative advantage have come to reflect its factor endowment. These results suggest that Vietnam could better diversify its export structures and shift to exports based on human capital and technology by further liberalizing its trade policies, fostering human capital formation, and facilitating the transfer of technology.

The paper aims to investigate the difference in total factor productivity (TFP) among those firms with and without outsourcing in a developing country like Vietnam. Also, it explores the effect of outsourcing activities on total factor productivity with a specified concentration on the Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The panel data set of SMEs used in this study was originated from biannual surveys conducted under the collaboration between educational organizations and government agencies: Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Department of Economics – the University of Copenhagen, the Institution of Labor Studies and Social Affairs (ILSSA) in the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA). In this study, the model is developed based on the production function in accordance with the model of Girma and Görg (2004). The firms’ TFP is the difference between the actual and the predicted output as with the approach by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003).

This study finds out that firms with outsourcing have higher total factor productivity than those without outsourcing activities. In addition, the more firms spend on outsourcing, the higher total factor productivity they can gain. Outsourcing to SMEs in a developing country can significantly increase its TFP by means of either maintaining core competencies or searching external resources in conducting some internal activities.

Although outsourcing has been widely applied by large firms, the research studying its impact on productivity at firm level is limited. Especially, this study can shed light on the impact for the case of SMEs in a developing economy.

This paper aims to identify the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on labor markets.

The authors conduct a large-scale survey on 16,000 firms from 82 industries in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and analyze the data set by using different machine-learning methods.

First, job loss and reduction in state-owned enterprises have been significantly larger than in other types of organizations. Second, employees of foreign direct investment enterprises suffer a significantly lower labor income than those of other groups. Third, the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market are heterogeneous across industries and geographies. Finally, firms with high revenue in 2019 are more likely to adopt preventive measures, including the reduction of labor forces. The authors also find a significant correlation between firms' revenue and labor reduction as traditional econometrics and machine-learning techniques suggest.

This study has two main policy implications. First, although government support through taxes has been provided, the authors highlight evidence that there may be some additional benefit from targeting firms that have characteristics associated with layoffs or other negative labor responses. Second, the authors provide information that shows which firm characteristics are associated with particular labor market responses such as layoffs, which may help target stimulus packages. Although the COVID-19 pandemic affects most industries and occupations, heterogeneous firm responses suggest that there could be several varieties of targeted policies-targeting firms that are likely to reduce labor forces or firms likely to face reduced revenue. In this paper, the authors outline several industries and firm characteristics which appear to more directly be reducing employee counts or having negative labor responses which may lead to more cost–effect stimulus.

The purpose of this paper is to identify variables and their effects on the value of technology transaction according to technology demand approach in Vietnam technology market, by testing the hypotheses including the effects of technology absorption capacity, internal research and development (R&D) productivity of firms and difficulties in external infrastructure on technology demand.

The technology transaction value and its impact factors are assessed using Vietnam annual enterprise survey and using technology in production survey from 2012 to 2016. The effects of factors on value of technology transaction are determined by using feasible generalized least squares model.

The results indicate three main points. First, companies having higher technology absorption capacity and higher dominance in the domestic or foreign markets tend to acquire higher technology demand in the technology market. Second, companies having lower internal R&D productivity tend to require higher external technology demand. Finally, higher level of difficulty from external infrastructure prevents enterprises in accessing technology demand.

The main limitation of the study is that data of firm’s R&D productivity are not available. The study also does not mention information flows from competitors that perhaps have potentially significant impacts on external technology demand of firms.

The paper includes policy implications for the government and industry managers to increase technology transaction value.

The focus of many previous research papers on technology transactions was generally to look at the decisive factors behind firm’s technology supply in both developed and developing countries. However, knowledge about firm’s technology demand is very limited, particularly in the context of developing countries. This paper clarifies the effect of factors on the decision buying external technology for innovation purpose and productivity improvement in Vietnamese manufacturing sector.