MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

STATE BANK OF VIETNAM

BANKING UNIVERSITY OF HO CHI MINH CITY

NGUYỄN TRÚC QUỲNH

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON STOCK
INDEX VOLATILITY: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
FROM VIETNAM ON VNINDEX

BACHELOR THESIS
FACULTY: FINANCE – BANKING
CODE: 7340201
GUIDING TEACHER: DR. NGUYỄN MINH NHẬT

HCMC, NOVEMBER 2021


MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

STATE BANK OF VIETNAM

BANKING UNIVERSITY OF HO CHI MINH CITY

NGUYỄN TRÚC QUỲNH

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON STOCK INDEX
VOLATILITY: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM
VIETNAM ON VNINDEX

BACHELOR THESIS
FACULTY: FINANCE – BANKING
CODE: 7340201
GUIDING TEACHER: DR. NGUYỄN MINH NHẬT

HCMC, NOVEMBER 2021


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ABSTRACT
COVID-19 emerged to be a health crisis but its serious escalation forces human
to face with challenges in all aspects. Rapid increase in quantity of infected cases,
confirmed death as well as strict quarantine and remote working has slow downed
global financial markets which consists of stock markets. Since Vietnamese stock
market definitely could not be an exception in this crisis, a deep insight in the
influence of the pandemic on stock market volatility becomes essential.
The present study tries to explore the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on
stock index volatility in Vietnamese stock market through VNIndex volatility. To
estimate the effect of the existence of COVID-19 on VNIndex, GARCH family
models which are known for their ability to model volatility are emloyed. Using these
models, the asymmetric nature of stock returns and the volatility of stock returns in
the period of the pandemic are examined. Most of the previous studies has divided
the sample period into two sub-periods, one period before the emergence of the
epidemic and one after that appearance. In this paper, the same approach is going to
be applied. In order to capture the volatility, the author utilizes at the same time the
GARCH(1,1) and EGARCH(1,1) models for the pre-COVID-19 era and the postCOVID-19 era as well. The results of this study indicate that the pandemic has had a
significant and positive impact on stock market volatility, which means it has caused
higher volatility. In addition, the result also confirm the existence of leverage effect.



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DECLARATION OF AUTHENTICITY
This thesis with the topic “The impact of COVID-19 on stock index volatility:
Empirical evidence from Vietnam on VNIndex” is the author's research work and the
research results are honest. There are no previously published contents or contents
made by other authors except for the cited references which are from clear sources
presented in the thesis. The author would like to be responsible for my commitment.
Ho Chi Minh City, November 2021
Student in charge

Nguyễn Trúc Quỳnh


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, a complete study would not be done without any assistance.
I would like to express my gratitude for the patience, support, and academic advice
of my supervisor, Dr. Nguyễn Minh Nhật, without whom this thesis would surely not
be possible.
Secondly, I would like to acknowledge both the Department of Finance and the
University of Banking of Ho Chi Minh City, for providing me with knowledge in
finance and banking throughout four years.
Finally, I would also like to thank my family for their encouragement in the
process of doing my Bachelor thesis as well as in my four-year journey in University
of Banking.
Ho Chi Minh City, November 2021

Student in charge

Nguyễn Trúc Quỳnh


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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................... 1
1.1. Necessity of the topic ............................................................................... 1
1.2. Research objectives and questions ........................................................... 5
1.3. Research subjects and range .................................................................... 6
1.4. Research methodology ............................................................................. 6
1.5. Research structure .................................................................................... 7
1.6. Research contribution .............................................................................. 7
CHAPTER 2. THEORICAL FRAMEWORK AND LITERATURE
REVIEW ........................................................................................................... 9
2.1. Vietnam stock market overview .............................................................. 9
2.2. General impact of COVID-19 on the economy ..................................... 11
COVID-19 and Vietnam economy ............................................................... 14
2.3. Review of previous researches ............................................................... 16
2.4. Gaps of previous studies ........................................................................ 20
CHAPTER 3. DATA AND METHODOLOGY .......................................... 22
3.1. Data ........................................................................................................ 22
3.2. Methodology .......................................................................................... 22
3.3. Testing for ARCH effect ........................................................................ 25
3.4. Research models .................................................................................... 26
CHAPTER 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ............................................ 29
4.1. Descriptive statistics .............................................................................. 29
4.2. Unit root test........................................................................................... 31

4.3. Test of ARCH effect on the data set ...................................................... 32


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4.4. Empirical findings and results of estimation of GARCH model ........... 33
4.5. Empirical findings and results of estimation of EGARCH model......... 35
4.6. Comparision with previous researches .................................................. 37
CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS................. 39
5.1. Conclusion ............................................................................................. 39
5.2. Recommendations .................................................................................. 40
5.3. Limitation and further research .............................................................. 41
REFERENCES ............................................................................................... 43
APPENDIXES............................................................................................... i-ix


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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
WORDS

MEANINGS

ARCH

Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity

ARMA

Autoregressive Moving Average


BET

Bucharest Exchange Trading index

CAC

Cotation Assistée en Continu (French stock index)

DAX

Deutscher Aktienindex (German stock index)

DJIA

Dow Jones Industrial Average

EGARCH

Exponential Generalized Autoregressive
Conditional Heteroskedasticity

EIU

Economist Intelligence Unit

FTSE

Financial Times Stock Exchange


GARCH

Generalized Autoregressive Conditional
Heteroskedasticity

GCC

Gulf Cooperation Council

GDP

Gross Domestic Product

GJR-GARCH

Glosten-Jagannathan-Runkle Generalized
Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity

HOSE

Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange

HNX

Ha Noi Stock Exchange


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IPO


Initial Public Offering

NIKKEI

Japanese stock index

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development

SENSEX

S&P Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index

UPCoM

Unlisted Public Company Market

VIX

Cboe Volatility Index

WHO

World Health Organization


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LIST OF TABLES & FIGURES
Figure 1.1. Total confirmed infected cases in the world ...............................1
Figure 1.2. Total confirmed deaths in the world ...........................................2
Figure 1.3. Total confirmed cases in Vietnam ...............................................2
Figure 1.4. Total deaths in Vietnam ...............................................................3
Figure 2.1. Real GDP growth of countries in 2020 ......................................12
Figure 2.2. The impact of coronavirus on stock markets since the start of
the outbreak ....................................................................................................13
Table 4.1. Descriptive statistics of VNIndex daily closing price from
02/10/2017 to 30/09/2021 ................................................................................29
Figure 4.2. VNIndex daily closing price graph ............................................29
Figure 4.3. VNIndex logarithm return chart ...............................................30
Table 4.4. Descriptive statistics of VNIndex’s return in two sub-periods.31
Table 4.5 Unit root test – ADF test ...............................................................32
Table 4.6. Heteroskedasticity Test: ARCH effect at Latency 1 .................32
Table 4.7. Heteroskedasticity Test: ARCH effect at Latency 7 .................32
Table 4.8. GARCH(1,1) model with dummy variable ................................33
Table 4.9. GARCH(1,1) model in two sub-periods......................................34
Table 4.10. EGARCH(1,1) model with dummy variable ............................35
Table 4.11. EGARCH(1,1) model in two sub-periods .................................36


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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this chapter is to present the main idea of the thesis, including
reasons to conduct the research; research objectives; research questions; research
subject and range; methodology and research structure.
1.1. Necessity of the topic

COVID-19, a contagious infectious disease caused by a new coronavirus called
SARS-CoV-2 which was first learned on 31 December 2019 in Wuhan, People's
Republic of China has been challenging and changing the world in various fields.
More than 218 million and 4,5 million is an enormous figure of total infected cases
and deaths, respectively, cumulatively counted to the end of August 2021
(Worldometers, 2021). Figures 1.1 to 1.4 below illustrate the total cases and deaths
in the globe and Vietnam. From the graphs, it is clear that the number of new cases
and deaths in the world has been constantly and sharply increasing. In terms of
Vietnam, the remarkable upward trend has been recorded since July 2021, when the
Delta variant made an appearance and lead to an unprecedented, huge wave of
COVID-19 in Vietnam and also globally.

Figure 1.1. Total confirmed infected cases in the world
Source: Worldometers, 2021


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Figure 1.2. Total confirmed deaths in the world
Soucre: Worldometers, 2021

Figure 1.3. Total confirmed cases in Vietnam
Soucre: Worldometers, 2021


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Figure 1.4. Total deaths in Vietnam
Soucre: Worldometers, 2021
The emergence of novel variants followed by continuous and prolonged

lockdown is what global economy, or in particular, stock markets of countries are
confronted with and significantly negatively affected by the pandemic (Al-Awadhi et
al., 2020; He et al., 2020).
Without a doubt, the influence of COVID-19 on the Vietnamese stock market
is inevitable. Interestingly, the reaction of stock returns to this disease varies from
time to time. The pre-lockdown of the first COVID-19 wave in Vietnam had a
significant, negative association with Vietnam’s stock returns. However, Vietnam’s
stock performance then experienced a significant, positive influence from this
lockdown period (Anh & Gan, 2020). In September 2021, Vietnam is in the fourth
wave of the pandemic, beginning from late April, which is along with curfew and
extreme lockdown in almost big cities but the stock markets are still operating.
Throughout the entire period of about twenty months from the first cases in the
globe reported, how the COVID-19 outbreak and its lockdown has impacted on
Vietnamese stock market is a studying-worth problem. With this intention, I choose
the topic of “The impact of COVID-19 on stock index volatility: Empirical evidence
from Vietnam on VNIndex”.


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The coronavirus epidemic is posing risks to many fields, not to say all corners
of the world and has become the biggest threat to the global economy and financial
markets. Global stock markets have shown a rapid reaction to COVID-19, in which
the Dow Jones Industrial Average - DJIA dropped by 2353 points on March 12, 2020.
Within a week, the DJIA fell by almost 3000 points, the biggest one-day plunge since
the “Black Monday” crash of 1987. In just one month, the UK-FTSE fell by 29.72
percent, Germany's DAX by 33.37percent, France's CAC by 33.63 percent, Japan's
NIKKEI by 26.85percent and the India’s SENSEX by 17.74 percent (Aslam et al.,
2020).
With the purpose of examining the impact of the pandemic on stock markets,

various researches were conducted in many regions and different methods. Onali
(2020) found that the number of reported deaths in Italy and France had a negative
impact on stock market returns, and a positive impact on the VIX returns. On the
other hand, Albulescu (2021) highlighted that the persistence of the COVID-19 crisis,
and its related uncertainty, amplified the U.S. financial markets’ volatility, affecting
thus the global financial cycle.
Furthermore, in the stock market of China, where the first cases were confirmed,
a large number of studies have been carried out to expand human knowledge of the
COVID-19. Stock returns were significantly negatively related to both the daily
growth in total confirmed cases and the daily growth in total cases of death caused
by the COVID-19 (Al-Awadhi et al., 2020). With a longer examined period, He et al.
(2020) found that the pandemic negatively impacted stock prices on the Shanghai
Stock Exchange, whereas it positively impacted the stock prices on the Shenzhen
Stock Exchange.
While in the emerging economy, particularly India, with negative mean returns,
the stock market faces losses during the pandemic. However, after the end of March
2020, the prices of two stock indexes took an upward trend gradually (Bora &


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Basistha, 2021). Besides, Anh & Gan (2020) stated that the daily increase in the
number of confirmed COVID-19 cases negatively impacted stock returns.
It has been nearly two years since the emergence of COVID-19 and the
pandemic continues as well as researches related to it. The results of studies obviously
vary from countries to countries. And for Vietnamese stock market, only few papers
have examined its volatility in full-length of the epidemic period. So that this study
aims to give a more adequate and detailed information about the impact of COVID19 on stock index in Vietnam through find out empirical evidence on VNIndex.
1.2. Research objectives and questions
1.2.1. Research general objectives

This research determines the existence of the impact of COVID-19 on the
volatility of the stock market. If it is confirmed that there is an existence of COVID19 impact on volatility, this study is going to find out how VNIndex volatility is
affected.
1.2.2. Research detailed objectives
In order to gain the general objectives, the author will start with investigating
the impact of COVID-19 on Vietnamese stock index volatility and then clarifying the
volatility tendency in two periods: before and after the pandemic is confirmed. In the
last stage, a comparison between the volatility of the stock index in Vietnam and in
other economies will be completed.
1.2.3. Research questions
To achieve the research objectives, the following questions must be answered:
Question 1: Is there the impact of COVID-19 on stock index volatility,
particularly VNIndex, when it emerged?


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Question 2: If the existence of COVID-19 does affect volatility, what is the
relationship between the information of the pandemic and volatility following the
process of COVID-19?
Question 3: Is the stock index volatility in the Vietnamese market in the period
of COVID-19 consistent with empirical findings in other parts of the world?
1.3. Research subjects and range
1.3.1. Research subjects
- The impact of COVID-19 on VNIndex volatility.
- The difference in volatility of stock market between pre- and post-COVID19 outbreak.
- Return of companies listed on Ho Chi Minh Stock Exhange (HOSE) through
VNIndex.
1.3.2. Range of research
This paper is going to examine the impact of COVID-19 on the Vietnamese

stock index volatility. For this reason, the research sample focus on the closing price
of VNIndex from October 2nd, 2017 to September 30th, 2021. This period is
considered to cover the period from both pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic but it
may cause the imbalance for the separation of two sub-periods.
1.4. Research methodology
In the financial sector, time-series data have the following characteristics:
leptokurtosis, volatility clustering, leverage effects and co-movement in volatilities.
These characteristics show that (1) the expected size of errors is not constant and (2)
variance is correlative with its value in the past. So that, we need models that allow
the Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) family of
techniques that have been employed by the previous studies to address the issue of


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optimizing the estimation. By providing a detailed specification of volatility these
techniques enable the link between information and volatility to be considered.
1.5. Research structure
The paper is expected to be divided into parts to answer the research questions
raised. The first part is a literature review that introduces general information of the
impact of COVID-19 on the economies as well as stock markets and researches
related to it. The second part is where the data and methodology employed for this
study are presented. In the third section, the author determines the impact of the
pandemic on stock index volatility through empirical results. Conclusion and
recommendations for the stock market are mentioned in the last part.
Chapter 1: Introduction, this section provides the reason why the author selects
this topic to take into research and presents the problem statements, objectives of the
study, research questions, reseacrh methodology and research contributions of the
study.
Chapter 2: Theoretical framework and literature review, presents general

foundation theory of the issue in this study as well as an overall review about relevant
researches regarding to it.
Chapter 3: Data and methodology, focuses on the introduction of the dataset
and the models that are deployed to investigate the impact of the pandemic on stock
index volatility.
Chapter 4: Empirical results and discussion, withdraws the emprirical results
from the estimations of GARCH family models and make some discussion on the
findings
Chapter 5: Conclusion and recommendations, summerizes the whole study and
gives some recommendations for individuals and institutions in the stock market.


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1.6. Research contributions
In the scientific aspect, the full influence of COVID-19 on the Vietnamese stock
market cannot be exactly determined now but this paper is going to update and
broaden the knowledge of this unprecedented and unexpected event and its financial
impact. At the same time, researchers can not only refer to and use the information
for relevant researches, but also expand and deepen the researches.
In the practical aspect, the author conducts the study with the latest statistics
which will serve as a reference source to investors, researchers and authorities. In
other words, to a certain extent, it will contribute to the foundation of the stock market
and in time investments, researches and policies may be carried out.


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CHAPTER 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND LITERATURE
REVIEW

In this chapter, background information relating to the pandemic of COVID-19
and its general influence on the global level and domestic level as well as previous
researches on this issue are introduced.
2.1. Vietnam stock market overview
20 years of establishment and development may not be a long time compared to
the history of the world stock market, however, Vietnam stock market has been
gradually growing and shaping its role in the domestic economy. Vietnamese stock
market officially began its performance when Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange
came into operation in July 2000 after more than three years of preparation, marking
a milestone in the economic integration process. As of September 2021, the number
of listed and registered companies trading on three stock exchanges is 1.646
companies, with the stock volume of 180 billion. The total market capitalization
reached more than 6.8 million billion VND, accounting for 133.83 percent of GDP,
thereby, showing the considerable role of the Vietnam stock market in the economy.
Vietnam stock market operates with three official exchanges, including two
listed (HOSE, HNX) and one unlisted (UPCoM) stock exchange. In specifically, Ho
Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE) is considered the largest scale exchange
which comprises biggest companies of the country.
HOSE requires higher standards in terms of charter capital, time of operation,
performance, information disclosure, and shareholders structure in enterprises to be
listed. In particular, enterprises registered to list on the HOSE need to have the
minimum charter capital contributed at the time of listing registration based on the
book value of VND 120 billion, higher than the amount of VND 30 billion on the Ha
Noi Stock Exchange (HNX). Regarding the time of operation, enterprises must have
at least two years of operation as a joint-stock company before the time of registration
for listing on HOSE while on HNX it takes one year. In terms of performance criteria,


10


HOSE demands that listed enterprises must have profitable business activities in the
previous two years, one year more than required by HNX. Regarding shareholder
structure, HOSE requires businesses to have a minimum of 300 non-major
shareholders holding at least 20 percent of the voting stock of the company. For HNX,
this standard is a minimum of 100 shareholders holding at least 15 percent of the
shares. Besides, the company on HOSE must disclose all its debts to internal persons,
major shareholders, and related persons.
In the three first quarters of 2021, 401 companies listed on HOSE; the average
trading value reached more than VND 19,500 billion/session with the average trading
volume at 682,42 million shares/session. Market capitalization on HOSE accounts
for nearly 75 percent of the total market, equivalent to 81 percent of the GDP of 2020.
VNIndex is an indice that represents all the stocks listed on HOSE from the first
operation day, July 28th 2000. VNIndex is calculated with fomular:
∑𝑁 𝑃1𝑖 𝑄1𝑖

VNIndex = ∑𝑖=1
𝑁

𝑖=1 𝑃0𝑖 𝑄0𝑖

× 100

Where P1i, Q1i is current price and volume and P0i, Q0i is price and volume at
base period. VNIndex is constantly calculated and updated in trading time and
compared with the previous trading day so through this indice investors and
government has a general view to evaluate Vietnam economy.
In general terms, volatility refers to the fluctuations observed in some
phenomenon overtime. In terms of modeling and forecasting literature, it means “the
conditional variance of the underlying asset return”. In other words, volatility is a
statistical measure of dispersion around the average of any securities prices such as

individual stocks or market index. In finance, volatility is often used to refer to
standard deviation (symbol σ), or variance (σ2) and measured by the standard
deviation of logarithmic returns. Commonly, the higher the volatility, the riskier the
security is.


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Stock markets with high volatility can be considered unstable, and tend to
perform sharp upward and downward trend. In contrast, markets with low volatility
are likely to be more stable.
In the process of development, there have been various events that affected
Vietnamese stock return volatility. For instance, according to Long (2007), the
financial liberalization posed different impacts on the volatility in each period of the
first seven years of VNIndex operation. In the first year after the establishment,
Vietnamese stock market experienced the highest volatility in the examined period
which was relatively short. After more than a year, the volatility was found out to be
lower, meaning that the stock market was more stable. When the government decided
the second liberalization and state-owned enterprises went IPO at the same time, the
volatitity increased.
The introduction of index future trading was also an event that influenced the
volatility. Represented by VN30-Index, stock market volatility was concluded to
appear higher after futures was launched in which the volatility was more persistent
than that in the pre-futures period. (Truong et al., 2021)
2.2. General impact of COVID-19 on the economy
COVID-19 and global economy
COVID-19 has been a severe threat to the global economy for nearly two years
now, after being declared as a pandemic on March 11th, 2020 by WHO. The fact of
the quantity of worldwide COVID-19 cases surpassed 100 million on January 26th,
2021 proved the unbelievable spreading speed in one year. On May 9th, 2020, the

U.S. unemployment rate was at 14.7 percent, the worst rate since the Great
Depression. With 20.5 million people out of work, hospitality, leisure and healthcare
industries. One month later, The World Bank stated that COVID-19 will plunge the
Global Economy into the worst recession since World War II.


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In a report on March 2020, right after the official announcement of COVID-19,
it is said that the global economy faced at least $2.7tn (£2tn; €2.5tn) in lost output,
equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom.
Figure 2.1 presents the real GDP growth of countries in 2020 which is almost
covered with the pink and red panel, meaning that real GDP witnessed a collapse.
This was evidence of the severity once the pandemic emerged and has been
continuously spreading.

Figure 2.1. Real GDP growth of countries in 2020
Source: BBC, 2021
Lately, according to Agathe Demarais, Global Forecasting Director of The
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the global economy is not able to recover to preCOVID level and most G7 countries may need four years to reinstate their economic
growth. Obviously, poorer countries are more struggling to overcome this crisis
because of a lack of vaccines and equity.
In terms of stock markets, when the Covid-19 epidemic broke out around the
world and WHO announced a pandemic, the global stock market dropped rapidly and
sharply. In just one week from March 9th to March 16th, 2020, the US stock market


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experienced the biggest drop since 1987 and had to activate the "circuit breaker"

mechanism three times. On March 12th, up to 10 countries outside the US activated
the trading suspension mechanism, in particular, the Philippines on March 17th, 2020
decided to suspend the stock market to deal with the epidemic.
In addition, volatility levels of the U.S. stock market in the middle of March
2020 was approximate to those last seen in the Great Crash (late 1929), Great
Depression (the earrly 1930s), Black Monday (October 1987) and Global finanacial
crisis (December 2008) (Baker et al., 2020)
Figure 2.2 shows the changes in major stock indices of the world in about one
year, including two important events which are the beginning of the COVID-19 and
the announcement of the first vaccine. When the pandemic was declared, the indices
experience an enormous drop and until January 2021, the FTSE and MIB were still
in negative territory.

Figure 2.2. The impact of coronavirus on stock markets since the start of
the outbreak
Source: BBC, 2021


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COVID-19 and Vietnam economy
In Vietnam, COVID-19 marked its existence even before WHO characterized it
as a pandemic, on January 23rd, 2020. From the first cases until the present, Vietnam
has passed four waves of coronavirus pandemic. The first wave was confirmed right
on January 23rd 2020 and lasted for six months which was the same as the length of
the second wave counted from July 25th, 2020. The 28th of January 2021 to April 26th,
2021 was set to be the third wave and from the end of April 2021, Vietnam
experienced the most fast-spread and serious pandemic which is still on continuing.
Each wave went belong with a lockdown period in different lengths and especially,
the latest one which was caused by the Delta variant made Ho Chi Minh City live in

the longest lockdown, for four months.
As expected from the evidence of the global economy, COVID-19 has reflected
its negative impact on the domestic economy. GDP in the first quarter of 2020 which
was also the first quarter of the pandemic was estimated to increase by 3.68 percent
over the same period the previous year, which was the lowest increase of the first
quarter of the years in the period 2011-2020.
Surprisingly, compared to the global economy in 2020 – the first year of
COVID-19, Vietnam was one of only a few countries in the world that had positive
GDP growth, at 2.9 percent, the lowest growth rate in the consecutive ten years. In
detail, in the first quarter, GDP grew by 3.68 percent and in the next one, when losses
from the early stages of the epidemic were reflected in the statistics, GDP was by
0.39 percent. It was 2.69 percent and 4.48 percent in the two remaining quarters of
2020.
As of December 2020, there are 32.1 million people aged 15 years and older
who are negatively affected by the Covid-19 epidemic, including those who lost their
jobs, had to take time off or rotary leave and reduce working hours as well as income,
etc. Particularly, 69.2 percent of people had their income reduced and 39.9 percent


15

had to reduce working hours while about 14.0 percent were forced to take a break or
temporarily stop working or manufacturing business.
It was predictable that all sectors in the economy would be influenced by
COVID-19. For instance, on the negative side, because of social distance status and
lockdown periods, the aviation suffered from a rough year in which it was equivalent
to 43.4 percent in terms of passengers passing through the ports compared to 2019.
VND 18,000 billion was losses in operations of Vietnamese airlines while VND
100,000 billion was the reduction in revenue compared to previous year.
On the other brighter side, the total import-export value of the whole country in

2020 reached 545.36 billion USD, rising 5.4 percent compared to 2019. In detail, the
value of export goods increased 7 percent and reached $282.65 billion while import
value was at $262.70 billion, growing 3.7 percent.
Despite various challenges and damages, Vietnam was considered to have the
successful year of 2020 in controlling the pandemic and developing the economy.
However, since the existence of the Delta variant, which has caused the fourth wave
of the pandemic, Vietnam’s GDP is forecasted to reach between 2 and 2.5 percent in
2021, about 4 percentage points lower than the world average (Worldometers, 2021).
In fact, GDP in the third quarter of 2021 was estimated to decrease by 6.17 percent
compared to the same period last year, which was the deepest decrease since Vietnam
had calculated and announced quarterly GDP so far.
As the afore mention, the fourth wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam began on April
27th 2021 and caused the most serious lockdown in Vietnam, especially Ho Chi Minh
City for about four months. In this period, almost all employees in Ho Chi Minh City
worked from home and numerous of workers became unemployed. At least 70
percent of factories in the South had to suspend operations, while factories operating
under the "3 on-site" model had to incur large operating costs and reduce 40-50
percent capacity during this time.