Project manager plays a very important role in the success of any project. The primary duty of the project manager is to combine the outcomes or results of the various processes and activities of project management into a systematic project management strategy or plan for the project. In the construction industry, a lack of motivation is an urgent problem for many project managers in construction and engineering projects. Lack of motivation affects the quality and productivity of jobs, reducing profits and growth for companies, businesses, contractors or organizations that rely on human resources. The reasons for this lack of motivation are diverse ranging from salary to culture to life and working environment, among others. Through surveys and data analysis using Cronbach’s Alpha reliability and EFA (Exploratory Factor Analysis), our research scaled the factors affecting work motivation of project managers in the construction industry in Vietnam. The research results identified six major groups of relevant factors including (i) salary and benefits, (ii) work environment, (iii) promotion opportunities, (iv) organizational culture, (v) interest in the job, and (vi) relationship with the organization. From there, this paper contributed useful information as well as measures for businesses, companies, contractors or organizations in the construction industry.

Employability has recently become the first target of the national higher education. Its model has been updated to catch the new trend of Industry 4.0. This paper aims at analyzing and ranking the determinants of undergraduate employability, focusing on business and economics majors in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In-depth interviews with content analysis have been primarily conducted to reach an agreement on a key group of factors: human capital, social capital, and identity. The Stochastic Fractal Search Algorithm (SFSA) is then applied to rank the sub-factors. Human capital is composed of three major elements: attitude, skill, and knowledge. Social capital is approached at both structural and cognitive aspects with three typical types: bonding, bridging, and linking. The analysis has confirmed the change of priority in employability determinants. Human capital is still a driver but the priority of attitude has been confirmed in the contemporary context. Then, social capital with the important order of linking, bridging, and bonding is emphasized. Skill, knowledge, and identity share the least weight in the model. It is noted that identity is newly proposed in the model but a certain role has been found. The findings are crucial for education strategies to enhance university graduate employability.

The shift from elite education to mass education in Vietnam has met the demand for education for everybody as well as for quality human resource talent for an emerging nation. Under the resource constraint, understanding the quality dimensions of education and its priority level is important for effective and efficient policies. This study was carried out using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to develop quality criteria and a ranking model. Two rounds of in-depth interviews were conducted with fifteen experts in the field, who were rectors, employers, and recruitment specialists to develop the quality framework applied in Vietnamese universities under total quality management (TQM), starting from the input of the senior secondary school leavers, through a teaching process to the output. The first round of interviews were unstructured questionnaires designed to explore the main factors in quality assessment model. The second round affirmed the experts’ agreement on the assessment model. Then, fuzzy logic was applied to rank eight criteria in the quality assessment model into priority order: cost, teaching and administrative staff, leadership, curriculum, student-related factors, internationalization, admissions, and campus. The results are critical for identifying the necessary actions to enhance the education quality and to further research on the optimal quality model.

The objective of this research paper is to study the simultaneous relationship between fiscal decentralization, corruption, and income inequality among Vietnamese provinces. We use a balanced panel data set of 63 provinces/cities in Vietnam in the period from 2011 to 2018. The study used 3SLS-GMM (Three Stage Least Squares - Generalized Method of Moments estimator) and GMM-HAC (Generalized Method of Moments - Heteroskedastic and Autocorrelation Consistent estimator). Empirical evidence shows a strong simultaneous relationship: increased corruption will increase regional income disparities, income inequality, and increase fiscal decentralization. In addition, the results also suggest that an increase in per-capita income will reduce the level of corruption, or better control corruption of each province. The degree of increase in income inequality, which reduces fiscal decentralization, is the same for trade liberalization. All demonstrate that there is a simultaneous relationship between fiscal decentralization, corruption, and income inequality. In a region of high public governance quality, fiscal decentralization positively effects its economic growth. This issue will indirectly increase income inequality between provinces within a country. Our findings imply that a country’s fiscal decentralization strategy should be linked to improving corruption control and local governance effectiveness, indirectly improving income inequality between localities or regions.

Mechanization and automation constitute an essential stage in the production and operation of any company, as one of the determinants of increase in labor productivity and decrease in product price, while significantly contributing to shortening of the lead time. Businesses are, therefore, able to quickly put projects into operation, improving economic efficiency, quality, and aesthetics, which speeds up the national economic growth. For the construction industry to be the most effective, modern construction equipment is a necessity. It is one of the five main resources of a construction project. Thus, effective construction equipment management contributes to the success of a project and benefits the relevant construction companies economically. This paper presents the critical risk factors affecting equipment management and proposes suitable solutions. The questionnaire-based survey with experienced experts in the construction sector on the management of the likelihood and consequence of risk factors revealed thirty-two risks for equipment management in construction companies. These factors fell into six groups: (i) site organization-related risks; (ii) management-related risks; (iii) owner-related risks; (iv) supplier-related risks; (v) legal risks, and (vi) site condition-related and external risks. The results showed that management-related factors contributed to the most significant risks and problems for equipment management in construction companies.

The study investigates the factors affecting the profitability of listed commercial banks in Vietnam. Survey data for this research were collected from 10 Vietnamese listed commercial banks for the period from 2008 to 2018. In the study, we have built a model of econometric regression with the dependent variable being listed commercial banks’ profitability results measured through ROA. The research methods used include descriptive statistics, IV regression and OLS regression analysis, and the authors carried out the model verification with Stata 14 software. The results showed that operating efficiency, loans size, retail loans ratio, state ownership, inflation rate, and GDP growth are factors that have a positive impact on profitability On the other hand, variables such as capital size, credit risk, liquidity risk, bank size, and revenue diversification are statistically insignificant; hence, these variables are not statistically adequate to indicate the influence of those independent variables to banks’ profitability. The findings of this study suggest that the quality of assets should be considered in the context that bad debt risks come from lending heavily to the real estate sector. Meeting Basel II’s capital compliance requirements is relatively difficult for small listed commercial banks compared to bigger listed commercial banks in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the airline service sector plays an important economic role. However, it is a complicated industry that is open to failures. Negative emotions are an essential variable for the airline service industry because they can trigger a variety of coping behaviors that affect consumer loyalty as well as the image and reputation of the airline service providers. However, negative emotions and the accompanying coping behaviors are often investigated partially or as separate issues, thus leading to an incomplete understanding. This study is conducted to fill this gap by proposing and testing the causal relationship between negative emotions (anger, frustration, regret) and coping behaviors (complaint, negative word-of-mouth (WOM), and switching intention) in the context of the airline industry. Eight research hypotheses are tested. Using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) on a sample of 587 passengers in Vietnam, the empirical results show that anger and frustration influence complaints, negative WOM, and switching intention, while regret leads to switching intention and negative WOM. Thus, the research has important academic and practical implications. The empirical outcome could be of major importance for airline companies in planning to provide new services and achieve high performance in the long run.

This paper explores the barriers to derivative accounting disclosures in Vietnamese companies and ranks their relative importance for effective and efficient remedies. The Delphi technique was applied to get agreement of panel of experts on the measurement of factors hindering disclosure. Unstructured questionnaires were first sent to twelve experts who had both practical experience and academic knowledge in the field to get ideas on the obstructions to derivatives disclosure. The structured questionnaire was designed to get their agreement on barriers to derivative accounting disclosures. The data analysis with mean, median, mode, standard deviation, and quartile has been implemented to ensure the unanimity. Market-related factors, legislation, accountants’ attributes, managers’ attributes, information technology and communication, and on-site training were the six major obstacles agreed upon by the experts during their in-depth interviews. Then, these factors were ranked by applying the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The findings confirmed the priority of information technology and communication, which held the greatest weight. Legislation ranked second, followed by market-related factors and on-site training, which explained the impediments to derivatives disclosure. Managers’ and accountants’ attributes had the least contribution to the barriers to derivative disclosures. The results have important implications for actions to enhance corporate derivative disclosures in Vietnam.

To enhance the performance of privatized firms and state-owned enterprises, Vietnamese government set up a specialized monitoring body named State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC) in 2006 to supervise their performance. This motivated us to conduct this study to investigate the effective control of SCIC on privatized firms’ performance. We collected the annual reports of 500 non-financial privatized firms listed on HSX and HNX during the period from 2007 to 2017 from Thomson Reuters. Observations with missing values were removed and trimming outliers were implemented resulting in a dataset comprising of 4146 firm-year observations. We applied a quadratic regression model of state ownership on firms’ performance, and applied the method of Baron and Kenny (1986) to test the moderating effect of SCIC control. To fix “selection bias” that may occur and result in endogeneity of moderator (M), we utilized the PSM technique to analyze the marginal effect of the moderator (SCIC) on privatized firms’ performance. Our findings indicate a positive moderating role of SCIC on the relationship between the state ownership and firms’ performance. This implies that there is a positive effect of liberating the management of the private firms from government control, which also means that lesser the intervention of government in the day to day operational activities of a private firm, better the performance of a privatized firm is.

This study aims to develop a research framework to investigate the factors affecting organizational commitment among employees who are working in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) enterprises in Vietnam. The authors designed an online survey distributed to employees in FDI enterprises, collecting the data from 312 employees. All scales in this study are adopted from previous studies; tools employed include Cronbach’s Alpha, Exploratory Factor Analysis, and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to examine the internal consistency, reliability, dimensionality, and validity of each variable. Then, the structural equation modelling (SEM) was utilized in order to estimate path correlations between variables. Results indicate that the leadership style has the strongest effect on organizational commitment, followed by job satisfaction and working performance. Moreover, working performance and job satisfaction are also influenced by leadership style. However, there is no statistical evidence to show that job satisfaction has an impact on working performance. In addition, bootstrapping method is used to show the indirect effect of variables; results reveal that leadership style, though, does not have indirect effect on working performance via job satisfaction, but it indirectly affects organizational commitment throughout working performance. In other words, the study finds that working performance mediates the link between leadership style and organizational commitment.

With the strong growth of social networking sites such as Facebook in recent years, the potential of exploiting customers on Facebook is increasing. Presently, trading activities on Facebook is rapidly developing. Therefore, businesses have become increasingly competitive when selling products on Facebook, so as to retain customers as well as to satisfy customer, which is of paramount importance. This study was conducted to assess the factors affecting the satisfaction of individual customers in Vietnam when buying goods on Facebook. This study uses multivariate analysis techniques (Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Structural Equation Modeling) to determine the factors affecting customer satisfaction when buying goods on Facebook. Research results from 268 individual customers in Vietnam indicated trust and convenience are the two important factors related to customer satisfaction when buying goods on Facebook. Customer satisfaction is the result of consumer experience throughout the different stages of purchase. The more the shopping experience, the more the customers are satisfied when buying products. The price and products do not affect customer satisfaction (prices are easy to compare and products are easily understood on the Internet; hence, these two factors are not considered as determinants of customer satisfaction). Furthermore, this study provides recommendations to improve customer satisfaction.

Education policy is a dynamic process featuring social development trends. The world countries have focused their education program on empowering the learners for future life and work. This paper aims to assess the higher education curriculum based on a survey of 280 students, employers, alumni, and lecturers in both social sciences and natural sciences in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The fuzzy decisionmaking method, namely the Fuzzy Extent Analysis Method (F-EAM), was applied to measure the relative weight of each parameter. Seven factors under the curriculum development have been put in the ranking. Input with emphasis on foreign language was the highest priority in curriculum development, given the expected demand of the labor market. Objective and learning outcome and teaching activities ranked second and third, respectively. The traditional triangle of teaching content, methodology, and evaluation and assessment are still proven their roles, but certain modifications have been defined in the advanced curriculum. Teaching facilities had the least weight among the seven dimensions of curriculum development. The findings are helpful for education managers to efficiently allocate scarce resources to reform the curriculum to bridge the undergraduate quality gap between labor supply and demand, meeting the dynamic trends of social development.

The relationship between education and work is of the greatest concern to individuals and society because they are the key drivers of growth and development. In the context of Industry 4.0, labor and educators are facing the challenges of big changes in the workplace. How to prepare undergraduate students for the world of employment has become the most important mission of higher education providers. This paper explored the competency gap in the labor market in Vietnam from the perspective of employees who have been dissatisfied with the current status. First, a qualitative method with the Delphi technique was applied to confirm this consensus in an employees’ competency model. Then, the satisfaction level for each competency criterion was explored by applying the advance quantitative method, namely, best non-fuzzy performance approach. Lifelong learning was ranked first, followed by creativity and innovation, foreign languages, expertise and digitalization, adaptability, and finally, organizing and managing ability. Critical thinking and problem-solving were perceived to have the biggest gap. The order of competency satisfaction is useful in explaining the mismatch between education quality and labor market demand. The findings provide valuable guidelines for education managers who seek to bridge the competency gap and improve education quality.

Earnings management behavior is the use of accounting procedures, through accounting policies, to intentionally purposeful control in the provision of information to users. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between ownership structure factors and earnings management behavior of 30 Vietnamese commercial banks. The paper uses the ordinary least square method to examine this relationship and employs time series data of 15 years from 2005 to 2019. The study also uses agency theory an asymmetric information theory. The authors examined six independent variables related to the ownership structure and these variables are typical of Vietnamese commercial banks. The results of the study show that the foreign ownership ratio is an opposite effect, while the ownership concentration variable has a positive effect on earnings management behavior of Vietnamese commercial banks. Based on that, the article proposes a number of policy suggestions for the State bank of Vietnam and Board of directors of commercial banks as well as investors to identify and to limit the earnings management behaviors of Vietnamese commercial banks. This contributes to ensuring information transparency as well as improving the quality of accounting information of Vietnamese commercial banks in the coming years.

A construction project is a designed product made up of labors, materials, and installations in the project positioned on the ground and may include the underground and ground section, and the section in water or on the water surface. It is a civil, industrial, transport, agricultural and rural development, infrastructure, or some other. A key phase in the life cycle of these construction projects is the implementation when building products are made directly with workers, equipment, materials, and managers. If there is a lack of management experience, information, and problem-solving solutions to tackle the risks faced by contractors, especially foreign ones, will fail in controlling the project’s cost. This study was conducted with investigations, discussions, and evaluation of the factors that lead to cost overruns in the construction projects of international contractors in Vietnam. The principal component analysis (PCA) showed that those factors that influence cost overruns these construction projects fall into five general groups, including factors related to (i) the owners, (ii) the foreign contractors, (iii) the subcontractors and suppliers, (iv) state management, and (v) the project itself. Besides, the study proposes solutions to limit cost overruns in construction projects and improve the profitability of international contractors in Vietnam.

This paper examines the impact of gender on access to debt finance among Vietnamese enterprises. The paper investigates data and variables retrieved from the World Bank Enterprise Survey dataset using five Probit models. The regression results suggest that there exist more unfavourable debt financing conditions for women-led firms (WLF), measured as a lower probability of having loan applications fully approved. Firm’s age, working sector, and perception of access to finance as a difficulty are found to have explanatory power on the discrimination. More importantly, the perception of debt finance as a difficulty or firms’ level of confidence significantly explains the variance of the dependent variable of probability of loan approval, or gender effect would be more pronounced if the firm already has a low level of confidence. The paper also contributes in testing for the gender effect on Vietnamese enterprises from different sectors and scale, unlike other prior research papers focusing on specific sectors and/or small and medium enterprises only. The findings are highly useful for Vietnamese credit institutions to set out a specific business policy to attract more WLFs and help promoting gender equality in the working environment, especially in debt financing, which is often neglected in existing regulation and policy frameworks.

The paper empirically examines the bank-specific determinants of loan growth in the Vietnamese banking system for the period from 2007 to 2019. We approach the CAMELS framework and employ the dynamic panel regression to determine the effects of each CAMELS factor on bank lending. To ensure the robustness of results, we also use alternative definitions of the variables and different specifications with and without full sets of CAMELS components. With these settings, we display multiple important results. (i) We find that a large capital buffer tends to boost bank lending expansion faster. (ii) High asset quality might positively contribute to high loan growth; in other words, banks subject to high credit risk are discouraged from making loans. (iii) Less efficiently managed banks are more likely to adopt an aggressive lending strategy, highlighting the moral hazard incentives of Vietnamese banks. (iv) More profitable banks with excellent competitive advantages could expand their lending activities to a larger extent. (v) Liquidity is positively related to the loan growth of banks. (vi) Perceived interest rate risk tends to suppress loan growth since interest-rate-sensitive banks might be concerned about the adverse effects of unpredictable adverse changes in interest rates in the future.