A System of Sustainability Indicators for the Province of Thai Binh,Vietnam

Sustainable Development is a broad and universal concept. Indicators are a basis to measure sustainability and to direct policies that aim to achieve a better quality of life. Thai Binh, a coastal province in North Vietnam is strongly concerned about strategic sustainability development. To select a system of sustainability indicators, the Delphi method was applied in 2012. A two-round questionnaire was organized to use with 32 experts, who acted as participants. 69 indicators were selected from 98 listed indicators: 15 related to economic development, 5 to the sea and coastal zone, 1 to the global economic partnership, 4 to consumption and production patterns, 7 to poverty, 3 to governance, 9 to health, 4 to education, 3 to demographics, 2 to natural hazards, 5 to atmosphere, 7 to land, and 3 to freshwater. Conversely, 29 other indicators were rejected. The Delphi method allows indicator selection for identification of the process of sustainability. The system of indicators, as the first important step of the sustainable development process, provides useful information for decision makers and planners as well sustainability strategy. It is planned that the indicators selected should be applied in the province.     

Does greater household wealth make young children perform better? The case of Vietnam

Our study examines factors affecting children's cognitive ability in Vietnam for the period 2006–2016. We find that conditional wealth has a positive association with the cognitive capacity of 15-year-old children, manifested in all three methods of measurement: vocabulary points, math scores and reading comprehension scores in Vietnamese. Notably, the finding implies that improving household wealth after the children's first 1,000 days still plays an important role in the cognitive development of 5–12-year-olds. Also, it suggests that using conditional wealth enables us to capture the impact of economic shocks, thereby having a significant effect on the cognitive ability of children.     

ON THE STRONG LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS UNDER REARRANGEMENTS FOR SEQUENCES OF BLOCKWISE ORTHOGONAL RANDOM ELEMENTS IN BANACH SPACES

The condition of the strong law of large numbers is obtained for sequences of random elements in type p Banach spaces that are blockwise orthogonal. The current work extends a result of Chobanyan & Mandrekar (2000) [On Kolmogorov SLLN under rearrangements for orthogonal random variables in a B ‐space. J. Theoret. Probab. 13, 135–139.] Special cases of the main results are presented as corollaries, and illustrative examples are provided.     

Women in waste collection and recycling in Hochiminh City

The generation and management of urban solid waste is an urgent and growing problem in Hochiminh City, as elsewhere in the world. An important contribution to solving the city's waste management problem is made by the recycling industry. The well-organized private system of collection, trade and recycling includes door-to-door itinerant buyers, entirely women, who buy solid waste products from households; a range of small, medium, and big shopkeepers who purchase waste from the buyers; middle-men who link the shopkeepers with the recyclers; and the recycling or production units that transform products for sale to consumers. Earnings of itinerant buyers are low and may be declining. However, their self-employment is critical because they are often the main economic support of their families. Shopkeepers enjoy better standards of living but economic competition and recent environmental regulations threaten the survival of the industry. Policy options are offered for attempting to ensure the survival of recyclers and itinerant buyers, those     

An empirical note concerning systematic measurement errors in regression analysis

The bias in the estimated coefficient of an explanatory variable in a regression equation because of a systematic measurement error in another explanatory variable is considered. A general expression for bias is set forth. An actual problem is used as a case study in which the magnitude of the bias in an estimated price coefficient is evaluated using real data.     

Maximizing k-submodular functions under budget constraint: applications and streaming algorithms

Journal of Combinatorial Optimization - Motivated by the practical applications in solving plenty of important combinatorial optimization problems, this paper investigates the Budgeted k-Submodular...