Nguyễn Thu Phương

Using data from nationwide surveys of provincial institutions and private manufacturing small medium enterprises, this study provided the first evidence of the impact of provincial institution quality and firms’ participation in and intensity of corrupt activities on firm productivity in Vietnam. We found that the bribe intensity instead of whether firms bribed state officials or not (measured by a dummy variable) has a negative effect on firm productivity when the endogeneity of corruption and unobservable characteristics are controlled for. This finding contrasts to a popular belief about a paradox for East Asian countries where corruption is positively associated with firm growth. Title:  Corruption, provincial institutions and manufacturing firm productivity New evidence from a transitional economy Other Titles:  Corrupción, instituciones provinciales y productividad manufacturera Nueva evidencia para una economía en transición Authors:  T.Q., Tuye...

A research program was established to identify the governing factors for the partition coefficient (K D ) of heavy metals between suspended particulate and dissolved phases in the Day River system a tropical, highly alluvial aquatic system, in Vietnam. The targeted river system, draining an urbanized-industrialized catchment where discharged wastewater is mostly untreated, could be separated into the least impacted, pristine area, and the most impacted, polluted area. Organic matter degradation was shown to govern the variation of parameters like total organic carbon, biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, nutrients, conductivity, or redox potential. Heavy metals in both dissolved and particulate phases were enriched in severely polluted area because of wastewater inflow that contains concentrated metals and intensification of metal influx from sediment. Results show log K D in the order Mn < As < Zn < Hg < Ni < Cu < Cd < Co < Pb < C...

Recent studies have pointed out the potential of the compound specific stable isotope (CSSI) technique based on long-chain fatty acids methylester (FAME) to identify hot spots of soil erosion by means of land use types. We tested the applicability of the CSSI technique on the basis of soil and sediment samples derived from a small agriculturally used catchment in Vietnam which is exemplary for many mountainous areas in Southeast Asia. Following CSSI analysis we set up a statistical decision sequence to identify hot spots of soil erosion by i) testing for significant differences between δ13C values of fatty acids (FA) of different contributing land use types and thereafter ii) examining the data using a Monte Carlo simulation of mixing polygons to provide a quantitative basis for model rejection and exclusion for sediment samples which violate the point-in-polygon assumption and iii) applying a Bayesian model with a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) model fitting using ...