The effect of research and development (R&D) expenditure on firm output is an interesting topic, but hardly explored in developing countries due to the unavailability of data. This study investigates this topic in the context of Vietnam by utilizing a novel dataset of 343 firms listed on the Vietnam Stock Exchange in the 2010-2018 period. The effect of R&D expenditure is examined under the production function framework. In order to obtain the robustness of the quantitative results, we estimate the production function with two coherent techniques including the OLS and 2-SLS. An instrumental variable regression technique is adopted to avoid the endogeneity problem between R&D expenditure and other variables. In our empirical analysis, we find that R&D expenditure has a positive and significant impact on output growth. The finding is robust in both OLS and 2-SLS frameworks. Besides, the output elasticity to R&D expenditure of our result is much higher than the estimated elasticity of other countries. The results imply that a 1% increase in R&D expenditure in Vietnam will help to expand the output more than a 1% increase in R&D investment in other countries. The findings from our paper provide important implications for firm managers, investors, and policymakers in Vietnam.

The paper aims to investigate the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on private investment with a sample having 49 developing countries in Asia (17 countries) and Africa (32 countries) during the period of 1990-2017. Unlike previous studies, we split the data into three groups for further analysis, including the Asian, African and the full-panel samples. The results confirm a crowding-in effect which shows that foreign direct investment promotes private investment on all three research samples. Besides, the lagged private investment has a positive and significant effect on itself in the next period which reflects the inertia in the trend of private investment in recipient countries. In the full-panel sample, there are some macro factors such as GDP per capita, trade openness, and electricity that also have a positive and statistically significant impact on private investment. Besides, when more deeply estimate with smaller samples, we find that trade openness and labour force have a positive and significant in Africa, on the other hand, not in Asia. However, the domestic credit variable has a negative and significant effect on private investment only in Asian developing countries. Furthermore, there is only a positive and significant impact of the electricity variable on private investment in Asia.

The paper aims to investigate the impact of the gap between domestic and international gold price on money demand in Vietnam, an emerging economy in the Asian region. We use a quarterly database collected from the first quarter of 2004 to the fourth quarter of 2016. The time-series database includes 52 observations. The money demand is represented by M2; Domestic income is the Gross domestic product at the constant prices of 1994; Inflation rate is calculated by the Customer Price Index from the General Statistics Office of Vietnam. The result confirms the existence of a long-term cointegration relationship between the money demand and the gap between domestic and international gold price as well as some variables including domestic income, inflation, and real exchange rate. The regression results also show that the gap between domestic and international gold price has a positive impact on money demand in the Vietnamese economy. Besides, the domestic income and international gold price have positive impacts on money demand while the inflation and real exchange rate are negatively related in the long run. This proves that the gap between the domestic and international gold price really has a positive impact on money demand in Vietnam during the study period.