The construction industry in developing countries like Vietnam, which incorporates small and medium construction enterprises, is typically more prone to disputes and contract dispute-related lawsuits. A dispute may occur at any time in the life cycle of the project. It is sometimes solved with the intermediation of a lawyer or directly by stakeholders. Understanding the causes of disputes in a construction project not only improves the efficiency of a company but also increases the success of projects. This study was carried out using a questionnaire survey at construction projects in Ho Chi Minh City. Sample data with 117 observations were analyzed to find the disputing factors in construction projects: diversity of working style among the parties; reluctance to work; and poor teamwork. Correlation coefficient on a rank of factors between design consultant and contractor; Design consultant and project owners are positively correlated. The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) analysis identified six groups of factors in construction disputes: cooperation, technology, economics, productivity, information, and behavior. The findings are useful for enterprise practice and provide participants with an overview of sources of dispute. Thus, a more complete risk management plan can be formulated, which will accelerate project progress and improve the likelihood of success.
The concept of social entrepreneurship (SE) is gaining attention in developing economies for the purpose of greater societal welfare maximization. Still, findings in the field of SE studies have been riddled with conflicting results and counterstatement. Also, the determinants of developing SE are not robustly investigated in developing economies like Bangladesh. This context has mobilized the authors of this current study to focus on determining student’s intention to pursue SE as their career choice. Hence, the study aims to examine the predictive determinants of social entrepreneurial intentions (SEI) among Bangladeshi students. The study has investigated the influence of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, social support, prior experience, and educational support on SEI. The survey was conducted from a public university of Bangladesh, and 231 students participated in the study. Questionnaire items under each construct variable have been adopted from pre-tested research studies. Five-point Likert scale questionnaire was applied to measure the variables. SPSS version 23.0 has been used for statistical analysis through which correlation and multiple regression analysis were conducted to measure the impact of the independent variables on SEI. Results exhibited that self-efficacy, social support, and educational support positively and significantly predicted SEI, while prior experience does not influence SEI.
The paper examines the impact of proctoring environments on student performance in two different exam proctoring environments: online versus offline proctored exams. This study employs a set of aggregated data from 1,762 students over the eight-year period from 2009 to 2016 in a university. Although there were nine courses offered, they could have been counted more than once as students may appear several times to take exams for different courses. This study employs independent samples t-test and regression analysis to compare the means of two independent groups and to test the hypothesis. The results of the independent samples t-test and the regression analysis indicate that there is no difference in the mean scores of exams and, therefore, the findings suggest that the exam proctoring environment is unlikely related to student performance even when students take their exams either in online proctoring or offline proctoring environments. This study concludes that the proctoring environment unlikely results in a statistically significant difference of exam scores and, thus, the exam proctoring environment does not appear to cause any change in student performance. The findings suggest that the exam proctoring environments does not appear to impact on student academic achievements and assessments.
This paper investigates the influence of the economic integration exemplified by the Eurasian Economic Union on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Kazakhstan corporate sector. Using data collected from 204 small-, medium-, and large-sized Kazakh companies, the researchers analyzed the collected data with percentile. Findings of this study show that small- and medium-sized enterprises, especially in the tertiary sector of the Kazakh economy, are not that much affected by regional integration, whereas large firms have been significantly impacted. The originality of the paper is threefold. First, the research explores the entrepreneurial ecosystems in its focus on geographic location or digital technologies that came across mainly from the ICT space. This is becoming pervasive across mechanical systems, communications, infrastructure, and the built-up environment. Second, the originality of the paper lies in focusing on the entrepreneurial ecosystems’ influence on the business processes by clearly understanding the regional, national, and international trends in different markets. Third, the paper is first of its kind to contribute an updated perspective on the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s influence on economic integration to the policymakers of Kazakhstan. Policymakers will gain expertise on how to manage network effects while planning investment projects, as well as transactions, modes, and fixed nodes, acquisition, and greenfield investments.
This study develops the model to estimate the links between social capital, social entrepreneurial self-efficacy, perceived desirability and social entrepreneurial intention. Besides exploring the direct impacts of social capital, social entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and perceived desirability on social entrepreneurial intention, this study also focus on discovering the mediating roles of perceived desirability and social entrepreneurial self-efficacy on this relationship. Throughout adopting measures from some previous studies, the authors design the questionnaires and distribute to students in Vietnam. The study presents some demographic information of 289 students, who are studying at university and colleges in Vietnam. Then, the validity and reliability of scales are assessed using the value of Cronbach’s alpha, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In addition, by utilizing the structural modeling structure (SEM), the authors show that social capital plays the important role in shaping social entrepreneurial self-efficacy, perceived desirability, and social entrepreneurial intention. Interestingly, besides the direct effects on social entrepreneurial intention, perceived desirability and social entrepreneurial self-efficacy also mediate the correlation between social capital and social entrepreneurial intention. Also, with the interesting findings of the study, the authors propose several recommendations for policy-makers, educators and academics to promote the social entrepreneurship and innovation among Vietnamese students.
This study sees a critical gap in the previous body of research, which it seeks to fill; the disclosure of the unemployment ratio correlation has only been measured by the level of economic growth. This study is to add investment variables and government expenditure variables that objectively aim to measure the level of effectiveness in handling the unemployment ratio, which is then a measurement of the effectiveness of unemployment. Economic growth is measured by its impact on income inequality through empirical, conceptual relationships as a critical review and economic strategy for the future. The research uses secondary data on Indonesian macro and microeconomics since 2003-2018, then testing uses a quantitative approach to correlation, regression, and scatterplot. The results of this study show correlations between variables, and volatiles on the graphs show a similar trend. In other words, variables are bound together and support each other. The strategy of prioritizing the scale of government expenditure and investment to reach the target is the primary concern, so that the economic cycle can be optimal and equipped to face the possibility of an economic recession in the future. Many factors cause complex income inequality, though investment does not show a correlation to income inequality.
Bitcoin and other prominent cryptocurrencies have gained much attention since the last several years. Globally known as digital coin and virtual currency, this cryptocurrency is gained and traded within the blockchain system. The blockchain technology adopted in using the cryptocurrency has raised the eyebrows within the banking sector, government, stakeholders and individual investors. The rise of the cryptocurrency within this decade since the inception of Bitcoin in 2009 has taken the market by storm. Cryptocurrency is anticipated as the future currency that might replace the current paper currency worldwide. Even though the interest has caught the attention of users, many are not aware of its opportunities, drawbacks and challenges for the future. Researches on cryptocurrencies are still lacking and still at its infancy stage. In providing substantial guide and view to the academic field and users, this paper will discuss the opportunities in the cryptocurrency such as the security of its technology, low transaction cost and high investment return. The originality of this paper is on the discussion within law and regulation, high energy consumption, possibility of crash and bubble, and attacks on network. The future undertakings of cryptocurrency and its application will be systematically reviewed in this paper.
This study aims to investigate the main factors that affected the government health expenditures in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait), during the period from 2005 to 2019. The study employs a panel data technique in order to monitor the pooled determinant variables of healthcare expenditures in these countries. The study’s results indicate, by using FMOLS approach for panel data, that the average healthcare expenditures per capita in GCC countries have a positive and a significant relationship with the government revenues, the size of the population, and the governments’ public debt. The positive and the significant relationships of governments’ public debt may be explained even if the governments of the GCC countries suffer from a budget deficit; the GCC countries continue to increase the healthcare expenditure. The study suggests that the policymakers of the GCC countries must take into consideration those variables when they develop their healthcare policies. Also, the GCC countries urgently need to have high levels of foreign exchange reserves to maintain the expected level of spending on the healthcare sector, because their public revenues depend mainly on the oil revenues, which are fluctuating continuously.
This paper aims to investigate the factors affecting the quality of rural labor in Vietnam, a case study in Thai Nguyen province. For this purpose, we establish an integrated framework of factors affecting the quality of rural labor. We use Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy- AHP) to assess the weight of the criteria and sub-criteria of rural labor quality. This method introduced by Saaty (1987) is a useful tool to cope with the complexity of decision-making. The Fuzzy-AHP is one of the most common Multi-Criteria Decision-Making instruments for dealing with quantifiable and intangible criteria, which reflect the relative importance of the alternatives based on constructing a pairwise comparison matrix. The results show that the four most weighted factors are institutions, local government policies, technical qualifications, and mentality. In particular, the weight of the institution is the largest (0.2343), meaning that this factor is the most important one affecting the quality of rural labor in Thai Nguyen province. The weight of local government policy is close to that of institution, about 0.2259. The weights of technical qualification and mentality are 0.1238 and 0.1135, respectively. In addition, age and education levels do not significantly affect the rural labor quality of Thai Nguyen province.
The study investigates the effects of online instructional facilitator’s qualities on student performance of online class activities. The study explores the roles of instructional facilitators who may influence student performance of online class activities and their academic achievement. The study employs a set of aggregated data from 1,362 subjects and 10 facilitators who participated in multiple online classes. The results of independent samples t-test reveal that the student performance in online classes has no association with facilitators’ educational background or academic degree, as well as demographic characteristics, student evaluation records and instructional achievement. The results of multiple regression analysis show that the facilitator engagement has a positive relation to the enhancement of student interaction, reading discussion messages, and the quality of discussion messages in online discussions. The results of correlation analysis show that the facilitator engagement has a positive impact on both increasing the number of reading discussion messages and enhancing the quality of discussion messages. The facilitator engagement increases the quantity of reading discussion postings and enhances the quality of discussion messages, which would be a substantial contribution to student performance by facilitators. The findings suggest that student performance and academic achievement in online classes are not independent of facilitator engagement.
This research is defined as a study regarding on structured and systematized of existing literature review of the intersection between intellectual property management, management and technology transfer offices (TTOs). It takes a deeper look at requirements within universities, scientific institutions and the business environment should be interconnected with each other. The literature review shows that TTOs have control over the process of knowledge transfer and they have contributed to improving the efficiency of the use of production and human resources. In this paper, authors proposed the methodological tools based on methodology model, which identified success factors for using project management in TTO between two countries - Kazakhstan and Spain. Further, we used methodology is focused on solving the problems of quantitative analysis based on the use of primary data, which allowed us to reach a huge number of respondents without any restrictions, and secondary data from statistical database. Findings and results are summarized at the end of article show that Kazakhstan is following the path of the Spanish experience. However, Kazakhstan can become more successful in commercializing scientific technologies and transferring knowledge and technologies. In turn, Spain can use the data from our analysis to work on barriers and improve the activities of TTOs.
This study examines cognitive impairment, which is one of the results from social exclusion and leads to logical reasoning disorders. This study also investigate how cognitive errors called abductive inference error occur due to cognitive impairment. Present study was performed with 81 college students. Participants were randomly assigned to the group who has experienced social exclusion or to the group who has not experience the social exclusion. We analyzed how the degree of error of abductive inference differs according to the social exclusion experience. The group who has experienced social exclusion showed a higher level of abductive inference error than the group who has not experience. The abductive condition inference value of the group who has experienced social exclusion was higher in the group with the deduction condition inference value of 90% than in the group with the deduction condition inference value of 10%, and the difference was also significant. This study extended the concepts of cognitive impairments, escape theory, cognitive narrowing which are used to explain addiction behavior to human cognitive bias. Also this study confirmed that social exclusion experience increased cognitive impairment and abductive inference error. Future research directions and implications were discussed and suggested.