H. Nguyen

Vietnam has exhibited rapid economic growth over thirty years of comprehensive economic reforms. However, about half of the country’s active population remains in agriculture. In order to characterize the role of agriculture and livestock in Vietnam’s structural transformation, we assess ongoing dynamics at three complementary scales: national, sectoral (agriculture and livestock) and local (district of Bavi). We show that the transition since Doi Moi (Renovation) has given rise to a political economy that provides incentives to industries and services. However, labor abundance (due to population density) and limited land availability (85% of agricultural land is composed of less than 1 ha farms) have slowed the canonical structural transformation, and widened income inequality between agriculture and non-agricultural workers. In this ‘Lewis trap’ context, intensive livestock (as it is the case for aquaculture and horticulture) has played a significant role in increasing labor and land productivity, offering some perspectives to secure smallholder agricultural systems. But the emergence of those very intensive systems producing a lot of effluents has in the same time jeopardized sustainable development of rural and peri-urban areas. More recently, the political shift towards industrial corporate agriculture and large-scale farming has increased this pressure on the environment, and endangered inclusive agricultural development. Today, smallholder farming and rural communities encounter many challenges to exploit resources efficiently and gain access to input markets to achieve higher productivity and value added. To avoid the risk of poverty trap and to pursue a sustainable and inclusive development over the long run, deeper and wider reforms are needed based on smallholder viability, agroecological principles, and crop-livestock integration.

We present an argument-based formalism of contract dispute resolution following a modern view that the court would resolve a contract dispute by enforcing an interpretation of contract that reasonably represents the mutual intention of contract parties. Legal doctrines provide principles, rules and guidelines for the court to objectively arrive at such an interpretation. In this paper, we establish the appropriateness of the formalism by applying it to resolve disputes about performance relief with the legal doctrines of impossibility and frustration of purpose in common laws of contract. The formalism is based on modular argumentation, a recently proposed extension of assumption-based argumentation for modelling contract dispute resolution

Objectives: The official implementation of clinical pharmacy in Vietnam has arrived relatively late, resulting in various stressors. This study aims to evaluate job stress level and suggest viable solutions.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on clinical pharmacists in 128 hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City. Job stress questions were derived from the Healthcare Profession Stress Inventory.Results: A total of 197 CPs participated, giving a response rate of 82.4%. Participants were found to have moderate job stress with an overall mean stress score of 1.5 and stress rate of 52.8%. The sample size was statistically adequate and the HPSI was valid and reliable. Patient care responsibility was the main stressor, especially in public hospitals, followed by job conflicts. Lack of experience, low income, and inability to participate in clinical ward rounds caused significant stress to CPs regarding job recognition and job uncertainty. More practice-oriented training programs in bachelor curricula and clinical practice should be applied to help CPs gain more experience, self-confidence, and diminish job stress.Conclusion: CPs in HCMC have moderate stress. More practice-oriented training programs should be prioritized to lessen stress for CPs.

The phenomenological goal of grounding the content of conceptual thought in the background understanding of everyday, skillful coping was approached using evolutionary autonomous agent methodology. The behavior of an EAA evolved to perform a specified motor task was identified with skillful coping. Changes in the dynamics of the EAA controller occurred when the EAA encountered an unexpected obstacle with loss of longer time scale components in its hierarchical temporal organization. These temporal changes are consistent with the phenomenological changes which we experience with breakdown during equipment use with our adoption of a more immediate, determinate stance. Since this latter experience is the basis of conceptual thought, the EAA paradigm goes some way in providing a naturalized explanation for the grounding of the content of conceptual thought in everyday, skillful coping in a manner that is physiologically plausible and phenomenologically accurate

Plagiarism in higher education has become widespread among students in Vietnam. This paper aims to examine the seriousness of the problem by comparing the severity of plagiarism in two universities, one of which uses Turnitin software to check its student reports. For that purpose, 977 samples have been drawn from 1434 required graduation reports written by senior undergraduates in the economics and management field from 2013 to 2015. Turnitin’s “Similarity Index” was used to check for alleged plagiarism, which was found to be more widespread at the university not using Turnitin. At that university, 91.7% of the graduation reports were defined as plagiarized, while 61.7% of the reports were plagiarized at the university using the software. The main source of this problem was the use of information from the internet without citing the original authors.

In adopting a deontological lens to assess message ethicality, this study identifies and explicates the ethical dimensions of fast food advertising through five principles of the TARES framework of persuasion ethics. In moral weight, fast food—with its high calories and low nutritional value—is negatively prejudiced. A deontological-ethical perspective, by focusing on the quality of the advertising message, shifts the focus from the product to a more measured deliberation about the moral responsibility of fast food advertisers to reposition them as moral agents who are accountable for their messages. A content analysis of 380 television and print ads for fast food in Singapore shows that few ads met the TARES's expectations. Ads targeting children and teenagers are associated with lower message ethicality than ads targeting adults and the general audience, lending empirical support to the literature critical of fast food advertising's insidious approach of targeting the young.

Public parks play important roles in conserving biodiversity, promoting environmental sustainability, fostering community engagement, and enhancing the overall well-being of residents in urban areas. Nevertheless, finance is needed to maintain and expand the greenspaces in the parks. The current study aims to examine how perceptions of biodiversity loss consequences and park visitation frequency influence the residents’ willingness to contribute financially to tree-planting projects in public parks. Employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework analytics on a dataset of 535 Vietnamese urban residents, we discovered that perceived health loss and knowledge erosion as consequences of biodiversity loss and park visitation frequency are directly positively associated with financial donation willingness. Meanwhile, the perceived economic growth loss was found to be indirectly positively associated with donation willingness through park visitation frequency, whereas the perceived loss of nature-based recreation opportunities exhibits the opposite indirect association. Based on these results, communication strategies focusing on the multifaceted benefits of biodiversity preservation and investments in public parks are recommended to improve urban residents’ financial support to park panting initiatives, accessibility to greenspaces, and connections with nature. These are crucial for promoting an eco-surplus culture that enhances biodiversity conservation and human well-being.

As conventionally understood, corruption relies on a set of universally agreed rules that determine what constitutes the appropriate allocation of organizational resources. This article explores whether rule-based approaches to corruption are applicable where business organizations, such as public private partnerships, and the public fundamentally disagree about what constitutes an appropriate allocation of resources. Drawing on empirical research about PPPs in Vietnam, this article compares how government, business organizations, and the public conceptualize the transfer of public assets into private ownership. It argues that a public interest approach to corruption is needed where PPPs privatize public assets within the law, but against the express wishes of the public.

Structure and organization seems to be at the root of many of the questions raised about institutional behaviour; however, with respect to research on university capacity building, few studies have examined research organizational problems, particularly in developing countries. This study investigates academic reactions to the structure and organization of research at four leading Vietnamese universities. Through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with 55 participants, the study finds that the four case-study Vietnamese universities have accomplished a number of the more visible tasks of research management such as creating research and research management positions; deciding primary organizational units for research delivery; creating a research office; and creating research oversight committees. However, they seem to neglect the other less visible tasks of organizing and structuring research such as developing rules for research integrity; developing a mechanism for evaluating the quality of research outcomes; preparing researchers and research managers for the necessary skills and knowledge; and deciding vertical and horizontal decentralization. The study concludes that even though research has been formally structured and organized, the management of research has not yet been professionalized. The key problem in organizing and structuring research is the lack of an effective system for research behaviour formalization. A more effective system for better formalizing research behaviours should be developed so that Vietnamese universities can integrate more successfully into the global research.

In our ever technologically driven and mediatized society, we face the existential risk of falling into an info-calypse as much as an eco-calypse. To complement the list of values of a progressive culture put forth by Harrison (Natl Interest 60:55–65, 2000) and Vuong (Econ Bus Lett 10(3):284–290, 2021), this short essay proposes cultivating a new cultural value of protecting the infosphere. It argues rewarding practices and products that strengthen the integrity of infosphere as part of the newly emerged corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices are highly beneficial for the fight against contaminations of the infosphere, i.e., misinformation, disinformation, damaging contents, etc.

In this paper examines the roles and influence of China in the world and, mainly, in European Union. For a decade, Chinese investors have been looking for opportunities to buy european assets. Especially since the beginning of the 2008 crisis we observed an increase of investment activities of Chinese companies. During the crisis, cash troubled european companies due to loss of liquidity were forced to sell their shares at significant discount. Over time, with stabilizing the economic situation in Europe, European companies asset prices seemingly ceased to be cheap, nevertheless a volume of Chinese FDI to Europe continued to grow. Our goal will be detailed insight into these investments and try to identify the benefits and risks of these investments. Moreover, this paper not only provide insight into economic development of Chinese FDI but also take into account political issues and background of these investment. As far as a methodology is concerned, the basis of our work will be comparing an impact of Chinese investments in European countries and their impact on economic development in selected countries. In particular, we are interested in the behavior of Chinese investors and their motivation to buy in Europe. At the same time it will also be interested in the motives of European companies that have decided to sell shares to new owners. Finally, we will also examine ways in which Chinese investors proceed with acquisitions in the EU. Data comes from Eurostat, the national statistical offices and stock market prices. We will also be examining the political influence on these countries individually and globally, therefore as part of the EU. Based on the gained information we will try to assess the current situation of China’s influence in the euro area and at the same time try to estimate its future impact. Finally, based on the detected information to analyze the results of our research.

Human contact is a key issue in social interactions for autonomous systems since robots are increasingly appearing everywhere, which has led to a higher risk of conflict. Particularly in the real world, collisions between humans and machines may result in catastrophic accidents or damaged goods. In this paper, a novel stop strategy related to autonomous systems is proposed. This control method can eliminate the vibrations produced by a system’s movement by analysing the poles and zeros in the model of autonomous vehicles and goods. Using the pole placement technique, the motion of a system is guaranteed to be more stable, more flexible and smoother. Moreover, several control profiles are employed in the switching mechanism to choose the proper vibration-free effect. The main contributions of this paper are the recommendation of an active stopping planner using different smooth generators from a modelling study, the validation of their physical characteristics and the launching of a switching algorithm based on the socially aware navigation framework of a robot. This theoretical work is based on the virtual environment of MATLAB, and the experiment is implemented in the practical platform of an automated guided vehicle. From these results, it can be seen that the proposed approach is robust, effective and feasible for applications in storehouse management, public transportation or factory manufacturing.

Many problems in Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) research are formulated in terms of the abilities of a coalition of agents. Existing approaches to reasoning about coalitional ability are usually focused on games or transition systems, which are described in terms of states and actions. Such approaches however often neglect a key feature of multi-agent systems, namely that the actions of the agents require resources. In this paper, we describe a logic for reasoning about coalitional ability under resource constraints in the probabilistic setting. We extend Resource-bounded Alternating-time Temporal Logic (RB-ATL) with probabilistic reasoning and provide a standard algorithm for the model-checking problem of the resulting logic Probabilistic resource-bounded ATL (pRB-ATL). We implement model-checking algorithms and present experimental results using simple multi-agent model-checking problems of increasing complexity.

Motivated by a call for risk discourse research in non-Western settings, this study examines how Vietnamese road safety video advertisements are constructed and interpreted. Following a literature review of risk and gender, the study first sets out socio-semiotic multimodal analysis of video advertisements to detail how concepts of risk and gender are constructed. Afterwards, I take an ethnographic-based approach in a series of interviews with professional Vietnamese women to gain insights into these concepts. Findings of the study reveal the expected female roles as wives and mothers in Vietnamese advertising as interpreted by Vietnamese women. The study contributes to an understanding of risk in this Asian setting and opens up the potential for a critical, interpretive approach to risk discourses that are grounded in lived experiences.

Words not only define our reality, they reveal and direct our attitudes toward that reality. This feature of language is especially problematic when it comes to our treatment of animals. In this supple, thoughtful, and closely argued work, Vietnamese-American scholar Hanh Nguyen examines the words we use in English and other languages to justify our abuse of other-than-human world. Reframing our metaphors, categories, and descriptions of animals we love, hate, and eat allows us to break long-standing habits and see our obligations and connections to non-human animals more clearly.

Group sex among men who have sex with men may be understood as a ‘radical’ practice insofar as it transgresses dominant social discourses around appropriate sexual relations—prioritizing heteronormative, monogamous and risk‐averse sex. These practices are generally defined as steeped in risk, most commonly due to the potential for transmitting human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections and accompanied by the possibility of legal and social repercussions. Our ethnographic research study explored the desires, practices and contexts of group sex participants (n = 10) within a popular group sex party destination located in the United States. We employ a poststructuralist perspective (utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari) to understand group sex events with the pretext that bodies have no inherent ethics, meaning or essence: they are ‘bodies without organs’. We identify group sex as a form of boundary play, in which participants pursue new limits to what their bodies can do but within a carefully constructed environment that establishes norms of interaction meant to secure trust and safety between participants. A variety of risk reduction practices are shown to be promoted and honoured within these eventful sexual(ized) spaces. The application of poststructuralist concepts of ‘boundary play’ and ‘bodies without organs’ helped to depict the construction and navigation of pleasure, safety and risk among group sex participants.

Online book fairs are being held in Vietnam to replace traditional offline events that have been shelved owing to the COVID-19 crisis. This study aims to explore book consumers’ perceptions regarding digital book fairs and their evaluation of the first-ever national online book fair held in Vietnam. In-depth interviews were conducted to obtain insights from people who had attended the online book event. The findings provide acceptance of and support for the organization of digital book fairs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendees generally appreciated the convenience of the national online book fair and the promotional programmes offered by various publishers and distributors. Furthermore, some attendees enjoyed the novelty of the event and the feeling of being included in the reading community. Nevertheless, most of the attendees highlighted several limitations, especially the lack of social and face-to-face interaction. These findings have implications for online book fair organizers, publishers, and book distributors alike.