Sustainable development – including tourism development – is the general trend of all economies. With the orientation to build and develop the tourism industry into a key economic sector and become a tourist center of the Southeast region, Vietnam, Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province is demanding a proper, rational, development policy, while ensuring the development and exploitation of immediate natural advantages, and ensuring long-term sustainable development. The objective of this study is to examine the factors and their trends in sustainable tourism development in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, Vietnam. Methods used include descriptive statistical analysis, exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis. Data was collected from the results of a survey of 550 domestic and foreign tourists visiting Ba Ria-Vung Tau. With the help of SPSS statistical software, 12 groups of factors affecting sustainable development were identified including: economy, society, environment, humanistic tourism resources, natural tourism resources, tourism human resources, tourism products and service, tourism quality, infrastructure, technical facilities, governmental management and group of criteria to evaluate sustainable tourism development. The research results show that there are four groups of factors that significantly affect sustainable tourism development in Ba Ria-Vung Tau. These are groups of factors: Society, Environment, Tourism products and service, and Technical facilities.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the development and determinants of China-ASEAN trade relations over the period of 2000-2018. Employing both the qualitative and quantitative approaches, the results show that the trade relations between China and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have remarkably developed and rapidly grown over times, with a significantly important concentration on the segments of high technological and medium technological products. We also find that China’s economic scale is crucially impacting on the China-ASEAN trade relations under both the aggregate and sub-sector level. It is interesting to notice that there is no evidence to support accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and officially forming of ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA) to enhance trade relation between both sides. The findings also quantitatively indicate that there is much significant potential for the expansion of mutual trade between China and some members of ASEAN such as Brunei, Laos and Malaysia, while less potential is predicted for other members of ASEAN. It is strongly suggested that China and ASEAN should find a new proactive approach and make more efforts in improving the mutual political trusts to enhance trading activities in the coming years.

The objective of this study is to enrich the literature by investigating the impact of introduction of index future trading on spot market returns and trading volume in Vietnam. Data used in this study mainly consist of daily VN30-Index and market trading volume series during the period from February 6th, 2012 to December 31st, 2019. Using OLS, GARCH(1,1) and EGARCH(1,1) models, the empirical findings consistently confirm that the introduction of index future trading has no impact on the spot market returns. In addition, the results of the EGARCH(1,1) model indicate that the leverage effect on the spot market volatility is existence in HOSE. Specifically, bad news has a greater effect on the market volatility than good news of the same size. Moreover, our empirical findings reveal that the introduction of index future contracts has the positive impact on the underlying market trading volume. Specifically, the trading volume of the post-index futures introduction increases by 7.5 percent compared with the pre-index futures introduction. Finally, the results obtained from the Granger causality test for the relationship between the spot market returns and the future trading activity confirm that only uni-directional causality running from the market returns to the future trading activity exists in HOSE.