Climate-resilient practices and welfare impacts on rice-cultivating households in Vietnam: Does joint adoption of multiple practices matter?

Farmers have a long history of adjusting their production practices in response to changing production conditions. Using a multinomial endogenous treatment effects model that accounts for observable and unobservable heterogeneity, this study investigates the adoption and welfare impacts of climate-resilient practices on Vietnamese rice-cultivating households. We found evidence of clear and positive welfare impacts from the adoption of canal irrigation (CI) and the joint adoption of agricultural conservation practices (CP) and CI as the main adaptation strategies to increase water stress. More importantly, although farmers with access to CI systems obtained the highest returns, the joint adoption of multiple practices still had substantially high adoption rates and significantly positive effects on rice yield, rice revenue and household income. Our findings indicate that farms' and farmers' characteristics, market information and climatic conditions are generally the main factors driving rice farmers' decisions to adopt climate-resilient technologies, both individually and jointly. Follow-up policy interventions should focus on improving CI systems and promoting the joint adoption of climate-resilient technologies to improve rice farmers' well-being and enhance their resilience capacity to cope with incoming climatic uncertainty.     

The CAP and comparative advantage changes: The case of processed food and agricultural products

Conclusion This empirical study has analysed the implications of the CAP for member countries' net trade performance: To this effect it has attempted to distinguish supply and demand effects appropriately reflected in the comparative advantage concept and specific to a product, from factors related to national environment, specific to the country. Our findings have shown unambiguously that national environment effects have been relatively modest in general, compared to comparative advantage effects which have played a dominant role in determining trade performance. On the other hand, the comparative advantage gains over the period under consideration have been secured through a deliberate community policy choice and accentuated by the tendency of national governments to renationalize the CAP.This policy has undoubtedly been successful in bringing about an efficient agricultural sector for EC members and in reducing the gap in terms of comparative advantage between these countries, particularly to the benefit of the less favoured among them. However, since the CAP is basically founded on the manipulation of the price system which largely determines the present pattern of comparative advantage, a serious question could be raised as to whether this pattern will remain unaffected in the event that the support price system should come to an end, or at least be severely reshaped, in the face of the growing burden imposed on the community and the pressing need for the latter to sell the surpluses, with the aid of subsidies, on world markets. If the gains in comparative advantage could not be considered as definitively acquired, we should obviously challenge the wisdom of continuing to endure the cost of the policy.On a conceptual level, since the price system prevailing in the community has been policy determined, an investigation into the major determinants of comparative advantage for the protected products in following the Heckscher-Ohlin line which emphasizes the influence of factor endowments, whatever these factors may be, would appear to be in our opinion, irrelevant.This paper is an extension of a research on International Specialization in Differentiated Products carried out with the financial support from the Commissariat Général du Plan. The views expressed here are attributable solely to the author, who wishes to express his thanks to Olivier Gaussens for his computer assistance, and to Luc Bauwens for his helpful comments. For lack of space, the detailed computation will be sent on request.     

Customer participation to co-create value in human transformative services: a study of higher education and health care services

Previous studies on customer participation have mainly focused on its outcome benefits. The current study investigates the effect of various participation behaviors on both process and outcome value in human transformative services. Based on the data surveyed from health care and higher education services in Vietnam, the results show that active and relevant participation behaviors are crucial to co-create value. Information sharing, responsible behavior, and voluntary in-role feedback have different roles in process and outcome value. Voluntary in-role feedback is more important in health care service, while responsible behavior is critical in higher education. Moreover, distinction should be made between passive provision of information and voluntary feedback of customers to the firm.     

Can microcredit reduce vulnerability to poverty? Evidence from rural Vietnam

Extant literature has extensively explored microcredit's impacts, confirming its essential role in poverty alleviation. However, most studies focus on poverty measures that exclusively emphasize current poverty status without adequately addressing the potential of falling into or remaining in poverty. Furthermore, the role of credit services in helping the poor in rural areas appears to be underexamined in the literature. To address this knowledge gap, this study investigates whether rural microcredit can reduce household vulnerability to poverty. A theoretical framework is developed to capture the mechanism by which microcredit borrowing has a vital role in household businesses and impacts the probability of being poor in the future. The Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey data set from 2008 to 2016 is used to explore this issue. The findings indicate that rural Vietnam's access to microcredit significantly reduces vulnerability to poverty. Moreover, better-off households are seemingly the most effective at using microcredit, whereas the opposite is found among worse-off households. These results are found to be robust using the propensity score matching method.