Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen

Sustainable agriculture transition is increasingly recognized as a strategic pathway to mitigate environmental degradation and climate change in the agricultural sector. Drawing on Multi-Level Perspective and New Institutional Economics, enriched by secondary data and multi-stakeholder focus group discussions, this paper analyzes institutional drivers and barriers shaping the adoption and scaling of circular rice value chains in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Findings reveal that despite landscape-level pressures, a robust institutional lock-in, driven by fragmented legal and policy framework and obsolete informal structures, perpetuates the linear rice regime. To dismantle this lock-in, a synchronized approach is essential: strengthening formal regulations, shifting informal perceptions and social norms, and empowering intermediary institutions to facilitate sustainable agriculture transition in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.

The inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) worldwide, especially in European countries, suffered a steep fall due to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus. This article is the first effort to empirically investigate the nexus between digital transformation and FDI inflows, thereby finding a way to help countries overcome the current situation. Using the data of 23 European countries pre-COVID (2015–2019) and during the COVID health crisis (2020), we demonstrate a nonlinear relationship between digitalization and FDI inflows, implying that a certain extent of digital transformation could promote the inflows of FDI. Before the COVID-19 health crisis, digital business played a critical role in attracting FDI inflows. E-commercial activities also enhanced FDI flows during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and digital public services may be an effective tool to help countries overcome the health crisis. Furthermore, digitalization plays a critical role in promoting FDI inflows in both the short term and long term. Hence, digital transformation is an inevitable process that countries need to embrace in order to overcome the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and resolve the delay or lack of foreign investments.