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Despite the established nature of the empirical literature on capital structure a shortage of research in the Vietnamese context is apparent. Vietnam is absent in international analyses of capital structure in emerging markets (e.g. Booth et al., 2001; Deesomsak et al., 2004) and only two country specific peer-reviewed studies are discernible (Nguyen and Ramachandran, 2006 and Biger et al., 2008).
Nguyen and Ramachandran (2006) explore the capital structure of 558 Small and 
Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) for the period 1998-2001, while Biger et al.(2008) 
explored a larger sample of 3,778 mainly unlisted enterprises for 2002-2003.
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This 
body of evidence indicates that Vietnamese firms relied mostly on short-term bank 
loan rather than equity since equity markets were nascent in the periods covered by 
the research. With respect to the determinants of capital structure, commonly-observed factors in the international empirical literature like size, profitability are 
applicable to Vietnam (see Section 3.1. Hypotheses ). However, the impact of growth
and tangibility raised some contrasting evidence. Nguyen and Ramachandran (2006) 
find that firm growth is positively associated with short-term debt as high growth
firms have high demand for working capital. Further, tangibility had a negative
relationship with gearing. According to Nguyen and Ramachandran (2006) this is due 
to the dominance of short-term debt in total debt, which does not necessarily require 
collateral. Biger et al. (2008), add that Vietnamese banks paid more attention to 
liquidity than tangibility because they were mainly granting short-term loans. 
In addition to universally observed factors, these studies also research some Vietnam-specific factors. For instance, they consistently prove that state-owned firms (SOEs)
have more debt than their private counterparts due to their good relationship with 
state-owned banks. More interestingly, when “networking” and “social relationship 
with banks” are included into regression model, profitability becomes insignificant 
(Nguyen and Ramachandran 2006). This might imply that some factors are far more 
important than profitability in helping firms access to bank loans in Vietnam. 
Some limitations in these prior studies on Vietnamese capital structure highlight the 
need for further research. Firstly, most prior work focused on unlisted companies and 
SMEs. Second, as acknowledged by Nguyen and Ramachandran (2006), the 
reliability of data employed in previous studies is questionable as financial 
information was drawn from unaudited statements. Finally, with datasets dating back
to 1998-2001 and 2002-2003 for Nguyen and Ramachandran (2006) and Biger et al.
(2008) respectively, their findings reflect an outdated context. For instance, during 
1998-2003, Vietnam was in the early stages of transition from command to a market 
economy; it is therefore understandable that distortions in financing activities (i.e 
social relationships with banks) should have still been dominant. Similarly, as state-owned firms dominated the economy, so close relationships between SOEs and 
leverage was understandable. However, the question remains whether the subsequent 
development of stock and bond markets, coupled with the continuing restructuring 
and equitization of SOEs has altered the nature capital structure in Vietnam 
enterprises (See 1. Introductionand Table 1 for an overview of how the Vietnamese 
financial system has developed in recent years).
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