The impact of foreign direct imvestment (FDI) on economic growth is still a highly controversial issue as remarked by many researchers (Aitken et al.; 1997; Carkovic & Levine, 2002; Bende-Nabende et al., 2003; Durham, 2004; and Hsiao, 2006). Using a panel dataset of 43 provinces in Vietnam during 1997 – 2012 and the Granger causality test by Arellano-Bond GMM and PMG estimation, this paper shows that: (i) FDI does Granger-cause private investment, human resources, taxation, infrastructure, trade openness and local technology; (ii) FDI has a positive impacts on provincial economic growth in the long term; and (iii) FDI flows vary over provinces due to differences in geographical conditions and level of development.

As the world of business is becoming more globalized and diverse, business ethics also becomes a complicated and frequently controversial topic. Organizations as well as individuals are fully aware that business ethical issues can have a great influence on the public attitudes toward them, and unethical behaviors and conducts can destroy trust. In turn, ethical leaders and employees can influence positively decisions and behaviors of others, which can lead to organization’s sustainability. Today’s workplace has a high demand for ethical behaviors of all employees. This study examines the personal business ethics perceptions of 964 Vietnamese adults based on age, gender, management experience, and code of conduct by using Clark & Clark's (1966) Personal Business Ethics Scores (PBES) measure. The results demonstrate that there is a significant difference in personal business ethics perceptions on each variable. It appears that younger Vietnamese adults have higher personal business ethics scores than older adults. Vietnamese females scored higher than males. People with management experience have lower scores while those who have not experienced codes of conduct have higher scores than those who have experienced codes of conduct. In this study, literature review on ethics, corruption perception index of Vietnam, limitations, and implications are also provided.

Destination brand personality is a rather new approach taken by many academic and empirical researches. Destination brand personality became an important structure to understand a tourist’s choice process, and a way of differentiating destinations and enhancing their competitiveness. The research focuses on analyses of destination brand personalities of Đà Nẵng based on domestic tourists’ perception in order to identify dimensions and strengths of personalities associated with Đà Nẵng as a destination. The results show that destination brand personality can be identified through three dimensions: sincerity, excitement, and competence-charming, which consist of thirteen items. Among them, sincerity and excitement are two principal factors of destination personality, compliant with findings by most previous researches. The new factor for destination of Đà Nẵng is competence-charming.

Environmental issues are taking more attentions from many countries in the world and have forced proactive companies to adopt environmental policy and encourage supervisory support behaviors in an aim to increase employee willingness to promote eco-initiatives. The study assessed environmental policy and supervisory support behaviors as creating an impetus for environmental actions in companies, leading to environmentally proactive firms sending encourgamental signals to employees. Data of 212 mid- and low- level employees was collected from questionnaire survey at three companies located in Hà Nội and Đà Nẵng City in Vietnam during January 2013. By using likelihood ratio tests and logistic regression analyses, the results supported both two hypotheses: Environmental policies will influence on employee willingness to promote eco-initiatives; Supervisory support behaviors will influence on employee willingness to promote eco-initiatives. From then on, some implications were suggested.

Exploiting data of Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey 2010, the study aims at finding determinants of income diversification at household level in rural Vietnam and evaluating effects of income diversification on household income. The data set covers 6,571 rural households of eight socio-economic regions. Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) is applied to show income diversification at household level. Two-limit tobit model is applied to detect the effects of household features and community characteristics on HHI, and then generalized method of moments (GMM) is employed to test the effects of HHI on household income. The results show that human capital in both quantity and quality terms plays a substantial role in encouraging rural households to diversify their income-generating activities. Rural households with higher education level and higher diversification ability tend to have more diverse income sources. Owning larger sources of physical capital, or better credit accessibility, and social capital also helps rural households improve income diversity. The results also confirm that income diversification is the dynamic of rural income improvement. Households can increase their income by diversifying their farm and non-farm activities.

To examine the role of human capital in economic growth in coastal provinces of Southern Central Vietnam (SCV), the research employs data from balance sheets of eight provinces in this region and a neoclassical growth model with an extended Cobb-Douglas production function including the following variables: output, capital, labor, human capital and other macroeconomic variables that have effects on economic development. The estimation results based on the fixed effect model show that the economic growth is affected by capital, labor, human capital, FDI, public expenditure, and agricultural production. Of this variable, the human capital is represented by average schooling year of laborers with an estimated effect of nearly 0.43% per a one-percent increase in the average schooling year.

The paper discusses how internal and external factors affect economic growth in the economic literature and explores the economic mechanisms through which the macroeconomic variables might impact economic growth directly and indirectly. The simultaneous equation system is employed in order to introduce the key macroeconomic behavior functions using the Vietnamese data for the period 1986 – 2013. The findings are: (1) the major contribution to economic growth is the quantity of investment instead of the quality of investment; (2) the optimal macroeconomic stability has positively affected economic growth; (3) exports have positively impacted on economic growth; (4) the public investment crowds in the private investment generally; and (5) the income, capacity utilization, and the optimal inflation have positively impacted consumption. The paper also shows that the GDP growth rate does not capture well the economic performance of the country because it does not take into account the net factor payment from abroad, natural resource depletion, and the inefficient intra-industry trade.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between foreign ownership and firm performance in Vietnam. We use a data set including market and accounting variables of firms listed on Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HOSE) for the period from 2007 to 2012. The results show a significant correlation between foreign ownership and firm performance. The regressions on each level of foreign ownership indicate that foreign ownership is found to be significantly and positively correlated with firm performance when foreigners own between 5% and 20% of shares in firms, while a negative correlation occurs where foreign holdings are more than 20%, specially and considerably negative where the level is more than 40%; and there is no significant relationship between the two variables where foreigners own less than 5% of shares.