My-Linh Thi Nguyen

The paper investigates the correlation between stock market, real estate market, and economic growth in Vietnam, which is an emerging country. Quarterly data in Vietnam from the third quarter of 2004 to the third quarter of 2018 were utilized. By using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, the results reveal that economic growth is positively associated with stock market and real estate market. An unprecedented finding of this study is that economic growth (GDP) is more correlated to stock market efficiency (SME) than net trading value by foreign investors (FI). Moreover, global financial crisis (GFC) exerts a negative impact on economic growth and real estate market in Vietnam. Further, net trading value by foreign investors (FI) also negatively influences real estate market (REM) in the short term. The study has greatly succeeded in giving first empirical evidence on the relationship between stock market, real estate market, and economic growth in Vietnam. More than that, the results show the key role of global financial crisis in this correlation. The findings are valuable to economies around the world, especially bringing a practical and meaningful value to developing countries like Vietnam.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows to Vietnam have increased significantly in recent years. Theoretically, capital inflows will put pressure on the overvaluation of local currencies in countries, despite different exchange rate mechanisms. So, the problem facing the Vietnamese government is the need to examine the relationship between the exchange rate and FDI in order to develop effective policies. This study examined the relationship between the exchange rate and FDI in Vietnam in the period of 2005–2019 using the VAR (vector autoregression) model based on quarterly frequency data. The new points of this study are: (i) using the real effective exchange rate (REER) of the Vietnamese currency with 143 major trading partners of Vietnam; and (ii) adding two control variables into the VAR model to examine the relationship between the exchange rate and FDI in Vietnam – a case study for developing countries. The findings show that, firstly, there is a positive causal relationship between FDI and Vietnam’s real effective exchange rate. Secondly, trade openness has a positive impact on FDI and REER in Vietnam. Thirdly, economic growth has an impact on REER, but no statistically significant impact on FDI was found. The findings can provide useful information to help policymakers plan and make decisions on future policies and support further research studies.