This paper examines the factors that drive temporal income diversification in rural areas of the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, based on a framework that conceptualized diversification as a function of a household’s capacity to diversify and incentives (both push and pull factors) to diversify. Drawing from five rounds of the Vietnam Living Standard Measurement Surveys covering a 13-year span (1993-2006), two panel datasets made from five cross-sectional samples are used for the analyses. The data are drawn from the Vietnam General Statistics Office. Both tobit model and Ordinary Least Squares model with random and fixed effects are applied. The main points emerging from the analysis is that income diversification is strongly influenced by household labor capacity. The relationship between household labor capacity and increasing insertion in non-farming wage activities is not driven by unobserved time-invariant factors such as household ability and motivation, but is instead driven by the higher labor capacity of households. In terms of the other household capacity variables, the effect of farm size is much larger in terms of retaining households in traditional occupations as compared to pushing them towards non-farm wage employment. Other variables such as household access to financial capital do not play an important role.

This study aims to measure the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and affective commitment (ACO), normative commitment (NCO), and organizational performance in food processing enterprises (FPEs) in the Mekong River Delta, Vietnam. To test the initial model proposed in this paper, a total of 422 owners, directors and managers of FPEs were interviewed from some provinces in the Mekong River Delta. The method of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is initially employed, then confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structure equation modelling (SEM) are used. The results of SEM showed that higher affective commitment was correlated with normative commitment. The results showed that four aspects of CSR toward employees, customers, environment and legal are significant factors. As a result, ACO and NCO act as mediators between CSR and organizational performance. This finding provides strong evidence of the important role of CSR to support positive impacts on ACO, NCO, and orgazational performance (OP). In addition, the success of the organizational performance is also found by contributions of CSR and NCO to its changes. Although ACO does not directly affect performance, it has a positive effect on the NCO. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance the implementation of CSR to promote implementation of organizational commitments.