Reading practices play an important role in the learning process of students. Especially in a fast-changing world where knowledge about nature and society is in a constant state of flux, book reading helps students foster skills such as thinking, valuing, adaptability and creativity for sustainable development. This research study used a dataset of 1676 observations of junior high school students from Northern Vietnam to explore students’ academic achievement and its association with their reading passion, family socio economic condition, parental education and occupational aspiration. The empirical results show that higher grades in STEM-related subjects are predicted by reading interest (βReadbook = 0.425, p < 0.0001), with students who love reading books achieve higher score than those who take no interest in books. Remarkably, the education level of the mother strongly enhances academic performance, with β = 0.721 (p < 0.0001) in cases of mother having a university diploma or higher. Students coming from wealthy families are more likely to buy books whereas borrowing from the library is the main source of books for students who grow up in not-rich families. However, even among wealthy families, investment into buying books still rely more on personal interest, despite the aforementioned educational benefits of book reading, as evidenced by an over 7 percentage point disparity between the likelihood of purchasing books among wealthy-family students who took an interest in reading (45%) versus students of the same background who did not like to read (38.7%). The results present implications for education policy making with a vision towards United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.

Book reading is an important factor contributing to children's cognitive development and education for sustainable development. However, in a developing country like Vietnam, statistics have reported a low figure in book reading: only 1.2 books a year. This research study used a dataset of 1676 observations of junior high school students from Northern Vietnam to explore students' reading behavior and its association with demographic factors, and the family's reading culture. Data analysis suggests the older the student gets, the less inclined they are to read, and being female and having hobbies of low sensory stimulation are linked to higher preference for reading. Regarding scholarly culture at home, students who read more varied types of books and spend more time on books are correlated with higher reading interest. Reading habits are also positively reinforced by the capacity to access books and parental book reading.

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The pandemic has caused several health issues and deaths and numerous severe devastations to the global economy. Due to the extreme impacts of the epidemics, it is crucial to investigate the pandemics and their pessimistically hidden influences to devise proper strategies. However, although this topic gains enormous recognition from scholars and researchers, there is still an inadequacy of a comprehensive literature review on the issues, and in-depth research on individual aspects of the world economy. Accordingly, the objective of this paper is to contribute a literature review that synthesises and evaluates prior research, to examine the current state of the pandemic impacts on the global economy, as well as become the requisite foundation for the practitioners to perceive how to respond to a pandemic in the future. A literature review is conducted, with 254 most relevant articles are analysed and classified based on the proposed framework. Thus, the findings of this study contribute diverse theoretical and practical insights concerning pandemics and the global economy. The results of this paper indicate the current status of the literature review and discover future research directions. Additionally, this paper proposes an integrated framework of the most influenced industries, followed by some emerging solutions to the most suffering sectors. Future research directions are further suggested based on the identified research gaps and the analysis results.