Production analysis of household-level paper recycling units in Vietnam

Three essays that incorporate social, environmental and economic factors into comprehensive production analyses of 63 paper-recycling units from Duong O craft village, Bac Ninh province, Vietnam are presented in this dissertation.; The first essay developed a reduced-form model of the household production function, in which social capital is treated as a production factor similar to other conventional factors such as physical capital, labor, and human capital, and household income and expenditure as dependent variables. The results show that social capital has a strong and positive contribution to household income, and the positive contribution of social capital on the general households' income is greater than that of the paper-recycling households. The results also indicate that trust and reciprocity play the most important roles out of four components of social capital in contributing to household income.; The second essay employed a parametric deterministic input distance function in computing the relative shadow prices of social capital with respect to physical capital and labor. The results indicate that social capital have positive effects on technical efficiency of the paper recycling mills and impacts of one unit of social capital on technical efficiency is much greater than that of one unit of physical capital, but less than that of one unit of labor. The results also show that the role of social capital in production process is different for different income groups and trust and number of memberships in associations play a key role in increasing technical efficiency.; The third essay presents the use of a two-stage procedure which combines deterministic linear programming with a stochastic parametric output distance function in which both environmental effects and the role of social capital were considered and encompassed within the production analysis. The results indicate that production efficiencies could potentially be improved by 28% and there is a potential for improving environmental quality through introducing pollution-prevention methods to paper-recycling production processes in Vietnam. Furthermore, the study suggests that it may be inappropriate to restrict the shadow prices of environmental outputs to be non-positive for the analysis of some production processes.