Having geographical proximity and a high volume of trade with China, the first country to record an outbreak of the new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Vietnam was expected to have a high risk of transmission. However, as of 4 April 2020, in comparison to attempts to containing the disease around the world, responses from Vietnam are seen as prompt and effective in protecting the interests of its citizens, with 239 confirmed cases and no fatalities. This study analyzes the situation in terms of Vietnam’s policy response, social media and science journalism. A self-made web crawl engine was used to scan and collect official media news related to COVID-19 between the beginning of January and April 4, yielding a comprehensive dataset of 14,952 news items. The findings shed light on how Vietnam—despite being under-resourced—has demonstrated political readiness to combat the emerging pandemic since the earliest days. Timely communication on any developments of the outbreak from the government and the media, combined with up-to-date research on the new virus by the Vietnamese science community, have altogether provided reliable sources of information. By emphasizing the need for immediate and genuine cooperation between government, civil society and private individuals, the case study offers valuable lessons for other nations concerning not only the concurrent fight against the COVID-19 pandemic but also the overall responses to a public health crisis.

Folklore has a critical role as a cultural transmitter, all the while being a socially accepted medium for the expressions of culturally contradicting wishes and conducts. In this study of Vietnamese folktales, through the use of Bayesian multilevel modeling and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, we offer empirical evidence for how the interplay between religious teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism) and deviant behaviors (lying and violence) could affect a folktale's outcome. The findings indicate that characters who lie and/or commit violent acts tend to have bad endings, as intuition would dictate, but when they are associated with any of the above Three Teachings, the final endings may vary. Positive outcomes are seen in cases where characters associated with Confucianism lie and characters associated with Buddhism act violently. The results supplement the worldwide literature on discrepancies between folklore and real-life conduct, as well as on the contradictory human behaviors vis-à-vis religious teachings. Overall, the study highlights the complexity of human decision-making, especially beyond the folklore realm.

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In today's competitive business environment, organizations are always seeking for valuable practices to build a strong brand and enhance purchase intention. Accordingly, this study is designed to propose and test the effect of country-of-origin image on brand image, brand evaluation and purchase intention. These relationships are verified through 283 customers with purchase intention of electric household appliances. Cronbach's alpha and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tests are applied to examine the reliability and validity of the scale. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is also adopted to test hypotheses. The finding shows that the country-of-origin image had a positive effect on brand image, brand evaluation and purchase intention. Brand image and brand evaluation also had a positive effect on purchase intentions. In addition, the study indicates that both brand image and brand evaluation played mediating roles on the relationships between country-of-origin image and purchase intention. As the result, some implications are discussed, and the next research direction is proposed.

As a generation of ‘digital natives,’ secondary students who were born from 2002 to 2010 have various approaches to acquiring digital knowledge. Digital literacy and resilience are crucial for them to navigate the digital world as much as the real world; however, these remain under-researched subjects, especially in developing countries. In Vietnam, the education system has put considerable effort into teaching students these skills to promote quality education as part of the United Nations-defined Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). This issue has proven especially salient amid the COVID−19 pandemic lockdowns, which had obliged most schools to switch to online forms of teaching. This study, which utilizes a dataset of 1061 Vietnamese students taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s “Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP)” project, employs Bayesian statistics to explore the relationship between the students’ background and their digital abilities. Results show that economic status and parents’ level of education are positively correlated with digital literacy. Students from urban schools have only a slightly higher level of digital literacy than their rural counterparts, suggesting that school location may not be a defining explanatory element in the variation of digital literacy and resilience among Vietnamese students. Students’ digital literacy and, especially resilience, also have associations with their gender. Moreover, as students are digitally literate, they are more likely to be digitally resilient. Following SDG4, i.e., Quality Education, it is advisable for schools, and especially parents, to seriously invest in creating a safe, educational environment to enhance digital literacy among students.

Reading practices play an important role in the learning process of students. Especially in a fast-changing world where knowledge about nature and society is in a constant state of flux, book reading helps students foster skills such as thinking, valuing, adaptability and creativity for sustainable development. This research study used a dataset of 1676 observations of junior high school students from Northern Vietnam to explore students’ academic achievement and its association with their reading passion, family socio economic condition, parental education and occupational aspiration. The empirical results show that higher grades in STEM-related subjects are predicted by reading interest (βReadbook = 0.425, p < 0.0001), with students who love reading books achieve higher score than those who take no interest in books. Remarkably, the education level of the mother strongly enhances academic performance, with β = 0.721 (p < 0.0001) in cases of mother having a university diploma or higher. Students coming from wealthy families are more likely to buy books whereas borrowing from the library is the main source of books for students who grow up in not-rich families. However, even among wealthy families, investment into buying books still rely more on personal interest, despite the aforementioned educational benefits of book reading, as evidenced by an over 7 percentage point disparity between the likelihood of purchasing books among wealthy-family students who took an interest in reading (45%) versus students of the same background who did not like to read (38.7%). The results present implications for education policy making with a vision towards United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.

The overspread of the novel coronavirus—SARS-CoV-2—over the globe has caused significant damage to manufacturing and service businesses, regardless of whether they are commercial, public, or not-for-profit sectors. While both the short-term and long-term impacts of most companies can be approximately measured or estimated, it is challenging to address the enduring effects of COVID-19 on teaching and learning activities. The target of this research is to investigate students’ manners of studying at home during the school suspension time as a result of COVID-19. Through analyzing original survey data from 420 K6–12 students in Hanoi, Vietnam, this work demonstrates the different learning habits of students with different socioeconomic statuses and occupational aspirations during the disease’s outbreak. In particular, we featured the differences in students’ learning behaviors between private schools and public schools, as well as between students who plan to follow STEM-related careers and those who intend to engage in social science-related careers. The empirical evidence of this study can be used for the consideration of the local government to increase the sustainability of coming policies and regulations to boost students’ self-efficacy, as it will affect 1.4 million students in Hanoi, as well as the larger population of nearly 10 million Vietnamese students. These results can also be the foundation for future investigations on how to elevate students’ learning habits toward Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4)—Quality Education—especially in fanciful situations in which the regular school operation has been disrupted, counting with limited observation and support from teachers and parents.

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