Farmers’ associations play an important role to help members increase their access to supports of information, capital, and technology; bring benefits to members; and partly promote production, enhance productivity, and increase income. This paper systematizes the theoretical foundation and empirical evidence on income difference between the member and non-member farmers and identifies factors that affect their decisions to join associations. By comparing specific characteristics between the member and non-member farmers, the paper examines the impact of joining farmers’ associations on the income of tea farmers in Vietnam by using the data from the survey of 742 farms. In our sample, 376 respondents are members and 366 non-members of associations in the four largest tea-producing areas, which cover 30 provinces in Vietnam. The paper uses OLS regression model to identify the factors that influence the decision of tea farms to join farmers’ organizations and tobit model to assess more detailed impacts of membership on income. The findings show that the farmers, who are members of an association, are more helpful in the ability to access better market services and more tea prices, and are more likely to earn a higher average income than those are non-members. Moreover, their memberships result in an increase of 0.166 unit of income. The research results also show that other factors, including labor, tea price, share of tea sold, farmer age, tea area, ability to access extension services, and credit services, affect the farmer’s income.

Credit is considered as an essential tool to make informal labor’s income better. In order to improve quality of their life, the state should have some supports them in credit access. This study analyzes factors causing credit access of informal labors to be changed in the time of COVID-19 pandemic. Using survey data collected from 2020 VHSSL (2019–2020), this approach has two models including a binary logit model and a multinomial logit model (MLM). The results revealed that the positive factors including education, material, collateral, credit size, credit source, credit debt which are likely to affect to credit access, however age, family size, ethnicity, interest, paid money are negative. Besides, it also concludes that quality of life of informal labor is considerably influenced by credit access, collateral, credit source, credit debt from the observed samples. Additionally, this paper recommends some policies to enhance informal labor’s access to credit and their quality of life.

For a common small- to medium-sized fish farm in an agricultural-based economy, monitoring costs is very important, since financial constraints are always a problem for these farmers. This will be thus easier if the farmers can get access to external funds. This paper used data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine the technical efficiency, cost efficiency and allocative efficiency of 639 fish farms in the Red River Delta (RRD) in Vietnam in 2018 to see how fish farmers control their costs and if financial access can really help in this matter. We found that these fish farms were very inefficient, meaning that they did not succeed in monitoring and allocating their costs and resources. Among the factors that could improve their efficiency, we found that developing the rural banking system to provide more financial access for RRD fish farms is an important solution.

Using data from the 2018 Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, our study investigates the impact of education on household income in rural Vietnam. Both mean and quantile regression analyses were employed to analyze the impact of education. We found that education has a positive effect on the household income after controlling for various factors in the models. However, quantile regression analysis reveals that the effect of schooling years increases with quantiles, suggesting that education bring higher returns for richer households. We also found that households with the heads having higher qualifications or vocational education tend to earn higher income levels. Combined together, these findings imply that while education was found to increase household income, it increases income inequality in rural Vietnam. Our research findings suggest that improving the access of poor households to better education is expected to increase their income and reduce inequality in rural Vietnam.

New business models integrated with technological advances like online food ordering platforms have been increasingly prevalent and are believed to bring significant value to customers. This study applied the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to examine how several factors influence the continuance usage intention of Gen Z customers when using food delivery applications (FDAs). Results from the CB-SEM analysis reveal that personal innovativeness positively influences the attitude of Gen Z customers. Continuance usage intention is positively influenced by attitude, perceived usefulness of promotion, and subjective norm. On the contrary, perceived health risk is indicated as a significant barrier to the perceived usefulness of promotion and continuance usage intention of Gen Z customers. These findings suggested discussions and have implications for stakeholders such as researchers, technology providers, enterprises, and policymakers.