SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATION AND DRIVING FORCES ANALYSIS IN VIETNAMESE CITIES

With the fast socio-economic development and globalization effects, city sustainability assessments have become an important topic that called the attention of many researchers and scholars. However, select a suitable set of indicators to evaluate city sustainability performance is a very complex process that involves great subjectivity. Vietnam has experienced a huge economic growth during the las two decades but despite the efforts made by the government, still there are shortcomings affecting sustainable development. This paper evaluates sustainability performance in 19 vietnamese cities, by choosing a set of indicators grouped into three dimensions, economic, social and environment, by following triple-bottom-line criteria. In addition, to calculate the indicators weigh, entropy method. Aggregation is a crucial step to build a composite sustainability index that allows ranking cities and make a detailed comparison among each other, due to different method can lead to different results, we chose weighted product (WP) as the best method from the ``information loss`` approach as selection criteria. The results showed that sustainability of 19 vietnamese cities is not ideal, according to mean values Hanoi ranks the first followed by Ho Chi Ming and Hai Phong. In addition, Nam Dinh, Ha Giang and Cao Bang rank the last. Using a panel data regression model, we investigate the main factors affecting urban sustainability, the SPSS data analysis showed that only land use has a significant effect on sustainability city performance at 5% significant level. We propose some policy analysis that can be used by city governments to enhance urban sustainable development.