State Auditing With the Investment in Public Sector： Case of Vietnam

In Vietnam, in the current period, public investment plays an important role in the improvement of technical infrastructure systems, economic and social development of motivation to promote national development. However, the question is how to ensure that these sources of funds are used most effectively in terms of limited resources. In this article, the author would like to emphasize the critical role of the state auditor which is not only in the transparency of information, in enhancing the trust of the citizens, but also in providing important and reliable information to the public sector agencies, units, investors, and people in the society. From that, it could help to serve the management and administration of revenues and expenditures of the state budget as well as reasonably and efficiently using financial resources and assets. In case of perfectly conducting those tasks, they will contribute the power to the economy, fight corruption as loss or waste, and detect and prevent violations of law; improve the efficient use of the budget, the money, and property of the state; and serve effectively for the operation of the National Assembly and People＇s Councils at all levels of the implementation and monitoring function to decide important issues of national and local governments. With the above information, these matters in Vietnam will be solved through this paper that consists of five parts： （1） the basics about the current public investment in Vietnam; （2） the role of state auditing in improving performance management and monitoring of investment; （3） the limitations of state auditing in public investment; （4） many solutions to promote the role of state auditing in improving the effective investment activities; and （5） conclusion.     

Political Economy of Industrial Development in Vietnam’s Telecommunications Industry: A Rent Management Analysis

This article contributes to the current debate in economics on the uses and benefits of rents and rent seeking. On the one hand, public choice and neoliberal scholars highlight the redistributive and damaging aspects of rent seeking, thus rendering the policy suggestion to completely eradicate rents and rent seeking in an economy. On the other hand, institutional and development economists point out the inherent theoretical inconsistencies shown in the earlier models, and suggest that certain types of rent and rent seeking could be growth-enhancing. Using the Developmental Rent Management Analysis, this article assesses the industrial development of the telecommunications industry in Vietnam using two case studies. Qualitative research points out a number of rent management factors contributing both to the industry’s failure before the early 2000s and its subsequent success thereafter. The successful development of the telecommunications industry was fundamentally based on (i) favorable political support for rent creation, (ii) an effective structure of rent allocation and implementation, and (iii) credible incentives and pressures that encouraged local firms’ industrial upgrading. The Vietnamese experience suggests that rents can be developmental, conceivably side-by-side with rent seeking, cronyism and corruption.     

Does Tourism Improve the Community’s Well-Being in Marine-Protected Areas?

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Time and place where gold acts as an inflation hedge: An application of long-run and short-run threshold model

This study examines the short-run and long-run inflation hedging effectiveness of gold in the United States and Japan during the period of January 1971 to January 2010. Previous research has shown in the long-run that inflation tends to appropriately increase the price of gold in the U.S., leading to gold's popularity as an asset in portfolios to reduce the risk against sudden inflation. However, gold is only partially effective in hedging against inflation in Japan. This research found that the rigidity between the price of gold and the consumer price index affects the inflation hedging ability of gold in the long-run. The gold price is characterized by market disequilibrium induced by the price rigidity, causing the price of gold to be unable to response to changes in the CPI. To explore the inflation hedging ability of gold in the short-run, this study further examines the price rigidity in low and high momentum regime. It is found during the low momentum regimes that, gold return is unable to hedge against inflation in either the U.S. or Japan. However, during high momentum regimes, gold return is able to hedge against inflation in the U.S., while the price rigidity in Japan causes the price of gold to not fully hedge against inflation in the short-run.     

Human capital and economic growth in an overlapping generations model

The paper describes an aggregative optimal growth model, the essential features of which are that individuals are mortal and obtain their labor skill through educational training. The process of human capital formation is described by an education function which relates the pass rate to the educational expenditure per student. Two alternative scenarios, private and public education regimes, are separately investigated. Under the decentralized education regime, risk-neutral individuals borrow to finance their education when young. Under the centralized education regime, the cost of education is financed by taxes imposed on the workers in the economy, and the central government maximizes a long-term social target function. The equilibria of both regimes are analyzed and various comparative static results derived. It is shown that educational investment in a decentralized equilibrium is higher than that in the centralized steady state. We also establish that there exists a time discount rate at which or above which the decentralized per capita consumption exceeds that of the centralized steady state whereas for time rates of discount sufficiently near the population growth rate, the above result will be reversed.     

Firm Value,Corporate Cash Holdings and Financial Constraint: A Study from a Developing Market

This paper investigates the nonlinear relationship between firm value and corporate cash holdings in a sample of non‐financial Vietnamese firms from 2008 to 2013. We focus on both static and dynamic regressions to test for a nonlinear relationship. Our results reveal an ‘inverse U‐shape’ relationship between firm value and cash holdings, which is in line with trade‐off theory. Specially, we further test whether the optimal cash level changes under different financial conditions. In turn, this paper shows evidence of a nonlinear relationship between firm value and cash holdings under different financial circumstances and that each type of firm will adjust its optimal cash level based on business conditions.     

Stock market volatility: friend or foe?

Although a good deal of research effort has been allocated to understanding the time-series volatility of stock returns – as both market (or systematic) volatility and idiosyncratic (or non-systematic) volatility – the relationship of such volatility with cross-sectional volatility or dispersion of outcomes is sparse. Nevertheless, the quest to understand one must involve the quest to understand the other. In this paper, we investigate the dispersion of returns in relation to inter-temporal volatility, as well as the dynamic of dispersion of returns in generating a portfolio’s return outcome. We find that the level of such dispersion is highly significant for portfolio performance and the notion of risk.     

连续创业者创业经验与再次创业成功关系研究——基于中国互联网行业面板数据的分析

通过研究中国互联网行业252位连续创业者创办的608家公司,对连续创业者先前创业经历与再次创业成功可能性间关系进行研究。从创业次数、退出状态、行业经验以及第一笔投资获取时间等维度进行分析,提出相应假设并运用最小二乘法进行验证。结果显示,创业次数及细分行业经验而不考虑先前创业业绩不能作为后续再次创业成功的可能性预估指标;创业次数越多与先前创业成功的创业者再次创业时倾向于等待更长时间才获取第一笔投资,而创业失败的创业者再次创业时第一笔投资获取时间更早;先前创业成功的创业者再次创业成功的可能性极高,而先前创业失败的创业者则容易再次失败;另外,无论创业者在相同还是不同细分行业进行再次创业,该关系都保持不变。最终,根据研究结果对投资者、政策制定者及创业者提出管理与政策建议。     

Trade-related R&D Spillovers in Vietnamese Manufacturing

ABSTRACT

This study aims to examine how Vietnamese manufacturing could benefit from R&D investment locally and from OECD countries through trade during a period marked with major trade liberalisations. Using the industry-level data during 2000–2009, it finds that the foreign R&D has accounted for the most part of the R&D spillovers in the sector, with a larger proportion earning from the other foreign industries’ R&D. The domestic industries’ own R&D has improved the sector’s total factor productivity, but in a relatively smaller magnitude compared to the foreign sources. In examining the localised effects of R&D spillovers in Vietnamese manufacturing, the results reiterate the important roles of trade-embedded foreign R&D spillovers from Japan, the US, South Korea, and Germany in the sector’s total factor productivity growth. These findings altogether give support to foreign technology diffusion as a major conduit for growth prospects in Vietnamese manufactures.     

Does WTO accession matter for the dynamics of foreign direct investment and trade?

The aim of this article is to study the impacts of World Trade Organization accession on the dynamics of foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade in Vietnam. In order to do this, we employ an augmented gravity model and use a panel data set covering bilateral trade and FDI between Vietnam and its 17 most important partner countries, over the period 1990–2008. Firstly, we find that WTO accession has a significantly positive effect both on Vietnam’s imports and on inward FDI. Secondly, even though we find no evidence to demonstrate convincingly that WTO accession influences Vietnam’s exports, this accession seems to indirectly encourage Vietnam’s exports through the FDI channel due to a strong connection between these two.