This paper conducted an indepth assessment on the efficiency of the impacts of trade agreements on rice exports during the period from 2000 to 2015. Based on the secondary data published by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam and the World Bank, the study employed random boundary gravity model to quantify the capacity of Vietnam to exploit rice export potential when participating in trade agreements, or in other words, to estimate the inefficiency in operation of rice export activities of Vietnam under the impact of trade agreements. The results show that rice export activities have not promoted well (at a low level) the impact of the trade agreements that Vietnam has participated in and not all trade agreements have a trend to increase the capacity to exploit rice export potential. Since then, this study provides some recommendations to improve the impact of trade agreements on rice exports in developing countries including Vietnam.

Culture is a powerful tool to communicate values and promote objectives of public interest that are broader than wealth creation. The economy of culture entails both cultural and creative sectors. The contribution of the culture to the economy has gradually been acknowledged, with the development of the cultural industries. Using the input output table methods, this research presents one way of measuring the economy of culture focusing on the impact of final consumptions of culture industry’s output on the growth of value added (GDP). Also, this study employs forward and backward linkage indicators of cultural industry that reveals the relationship between the cultural industry and other sectors in the economy. With the data from 2007, 2012 and 2016 input – output tables, the results show that although the contribution of cultural product consumption to the GDP is less than other sectors, the contribution of the cultural consumption to economic growth is quite high. The power of dispersion index of cultural industry in both 2012 and 2016 is quite high and nearly equal to 1, meaning that a unit of cultural industry change will lead to one unit of change in other industries, thus in turn leads to double the number of changes in value added of the whole economy.

This study was conducted to measure the level of economic linkage in key economic zones in central Vietnam generally and to measure the level of economic linkage in the tourism sector. Secondary data were collected from the Statistical Yearbook published by the General Statistics Office and the Local Bureau of Statistics and primary data collected from surveys of 102 hotels and tourism firms in the center of Vietnam. We used the Moran Index (I) to quantify overall economic aggregation across the region and that scoring method was used to measure the degree of linkage in regional tourism. The results show that the level of overall regional economic linkages was very low and this was also relevant when analyzing the tourism sector in some areas of the center of Vietnam. Based on the results, some recommendations are given for strengthening economic linkages in key economic regions of Vietnam.

The ownership - efficiency relationship in a firm has always been an important topic. In this paper, we focus on the state owned versus non-state-owned status of Vietnamese manufacturing firms, to shed light into the relationship between these two variables when using a more state-of-the-art method as a stochastic meta-frontier method. Applying the method for two periods: one during the global economic crisis and the other after the end of the crisis, the study determines that in both periods, there was a strong evidence that non-state-owned firms performed much better than state owned counterpart. We also found that the difference became even larger during the harsh time and sub-industries with non-state-owned firms could outperform the state-owned firms, significantly.

This study focuses on measuring the impact of trade agreements on Vietnam's rice exports based on secondary data sources produced by the General Statistics Office, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. Structural gravity model was employed for analyzing and quantifying the impact of trade agreements on rice export of Vietnam. The results show the impact of Trade Agreements on Vietnam’s rice exports is relatively low and not all Agreements bring positive effects. Based on the findings, we give some recommendations for Vietnam's rice export to adapt more to the contents and standards of the Trade Agreements and will be participating in the future.