The paper "Demographic transition and economic growth nexus: the case of Malaysia" presented at 6th International Borneo Business Conference (IBBC) 2014, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia.

This study was conducted to explore the linkages between savings and investment and to further test whether there is any evidence of relationship between financial integration and international capital mobility. The empirical model to test the capital mobility hypothesis applied here employs the panel data approach to the basic regression model used by Feldstein & Horioka (1980). The study covers ASEAN5 and ASEAN+3 (with China, Korea and Japan included). The findings of this study corroborate with other studies that savings and investment are cointegrated and this can be interpreted as a manifestation of the inter-temporal budget constraint rather than evidence of low capital mobility. The long-run equilibrium between savings and investment is in line with the inter-temporal budget constraints of an open economy as current account deficits cannot be sustained indefinitely. The relatively high degree of capital mobility when China, Korea and Japan are included in the ASEAN5 sample suggests that there is great potential for integration in the financial markets in these eight economies in the future

This study examines the meaningful relationship between economic growth, and service sector contribution and domestic investment in two major Asian economies, namely India and China. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedure is employed to analyze the impact of the selected variables namely (1) contribution by the service sector, (2) (4) domestic investment on economic growth and vice versa. The period of interest is 1960-2005 using annual data. The empirical results demonstrate that for the case of India, there is (1) a unidirectional causality from domestic investment to economic growth and (2) from economic growth to services. As for China, only unidirectional causality from services sector to economic growth is detected, while no meaningful relationship was found between domestic investment and economic growth.

Recent statistics released by the IMF (Figure 1) provide a comparative on the significant impact that COVID-19, and the lockdown in fighting and containing the pandemic has on global economies. The IMF forecasts that the impact is expected to be more devastating than the growth experienced in the aftermath of the Global financial crisis in 2009. The Euro area is where the most severe impact is envisaged, with estimates of economic contraction at almost 8%. This is followed by the United States with an estimated contraction of 6% and Japan contracting slightly more than 5%. China and India are expected to post positive growth at 2% and 1% respectively.

The paper "Primary market spread determinants government staff Islamic personal financing" presented at 6th International Borneo Business Conference (IBBC) 2014, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia.

Malaysian firms have been reported to involve in Asset-Backed Securities since 1986s where Cagamas is a pioneer. This research aims to examine the factor of influencing the primary market spread and measure financial performance of RCE Marketing as case study. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression analysis are applied for the study period 2007-2012. The result shows two determinants influence or contribute to the primary market spread and are statistically significant for the case study for RCE Marketing. The financial performance shows that this company is resilient during global financial crisis. RCE Marketing also shows better profitability capacity and dividend payments to their investors.

The on-off-on again-off again Malaysia-US Free Trade Agreement (MUSFTA) is a proposed treaty between Malaysia and the United States of America. Initial negotiations, in fact started way back in 2005 and as all other Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), the treaty aims to liberalise each other markets to parties of the agreement and directly encourage trade between the two countries. Malaysia has a commendable and enviable economic growth and development. Our macroeconomic policies have always been designed to create a more liberalized and fair international trade environment. Though Malaysia continues to accord high priority to the rule-based multilateral trading system under the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Malaysia is also pursuing regional and bilateral trading arrangements to complement the multilateral approach to trade liberalisation.

The purpose of this study is to explore the long-run relationships and short-run dynamic interactions between environmental degradation (proxied by carbon dioxide, CO2 and the independent variables of consumption (proxied by income level or gross domestic product, GDP per capita) and energy use in Malaysia over the period 1971 to 2008, using time-series analysis. The multivariate cointegration methodology is applied in this study to establish the possible causal relations between the variables concerned. The cointegration test and the vector error correction model display the evidence of a positive long-run relationship between consumption and environmental degradation while energy use is negatively related to environmental degradation. The long-term elasticity coefficients of the exploratory variables on environmental degradation display relationships that are theoretically grounded. There is evidence that consumption and energy use have a dominant influence in forecasting environmental degradation variance through further innovation analysis using variance decompositions. The study concludes with an examination of policy implications of the findings.

The paper examines the exchange rate exposure of the Indonesian national market, the Indonesia Stock Exchange, for the 1988-2009 period using an EGARCH(1, 1) model. The evidence indicates negative exposure of the Indonesian market to variations in the rupiah-dollar exchange rate. Moreover, applying a rolling regression technique, the exposure is found to be more negative in recent years. Thus, the rupiah-dollar depreciation tends to have an adverse impact on the Indonesian market. These results seem to be robust across specifications of the mean equation. Finally, our exploratory exercises indicate the potential importance of current account and financial variables particularly current account balance, financial account balance, financial development, and financial openness in explaining changing exchange rate exposure. However, their relations with the exposure seem intriguing and may be more complex than we thought.

This study investigates the relationship between crime and socio and macro economic variables such as income, unemployment, inflation, interest rate, and also the political violence, both domestic and regional. The main motivation of the study is to have a better understanding of crime as well as finding and suggesting alternative ways of approaching crime. We analyzed 21 countries, with data spanning from 1960 to 2001.We adopted the model and framework introduced by Viren (2001) based on Becker (1968), Block and Heineke (1975). However, we slightly modified by rephrasing it in order not to only capture the long run relationship but also the short run adjustment. We employed the panel error- correction based cointegration (Persyn and Westerlund (2008)) to analyze and estimate the model. A number of important findings are extracted from the analysis in accordance to the objectives of this study. Firstly, we discover a negative long run relationship between income and crime; positive long run relationship between inflation and crime; unemployment and crime; as well as lending rate and crime. As for the political violence variable, domestic political violence seems to be negatively related; on the contrary regional political violence is positively related. We believe this might be attributed to the spillover effect. All the signs are as anticipated and justified in this study; and are concurrent with most of the past literatures.