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Abstract Accounting and Finance has evolved from a news bulletin to a full-grown refereed academic journal that has published papers written by authors from Australia, New Zealand, the United States of America, Canada, Europe and Asia. The Journal published its 41st volume in 2001 and that anniversary issue coincides with the beginning of the new millennium. As part of the celebration of this important milestone, this article reviews the Journal's evolution, the variety of papers published and the Journal's impact on accounting and finance research in the Asia Pacific region. Data for 394 papers published in the Journal by 570 authors are analysed. I find that the distribution of institutions and authors that have published in the Journal is highly skewed, with the top five (11) institutions accounting for 35 per cent (51 per cent) of the published papers in the Journal. Similarly, 8 per cent of the authors have published 26 per cent of the articles in the Journal. Analysis of the citation pattern indicates that Accounting and Finance does not have much impact on research published in the Asia Pacific region, with the Journal accounting for only 1.06 per cent of all citations in the selected Asia Pacific journals. Sub-period analysis indicates that not even the establishment of the editorial board in the latter half of the 1990s has helped improve the impact of the Journal on research published in the Asia Pacific region. However, compared with other Asia-Pacific journals, Accounting and Finance has the strongest impact on publications in the selected journals. The impact is even stronger in the latter half of the 1990s. Also, the impact of Accounting and Finance on the more recent journals in the Asia Pacific region is stronger than that of the other more established journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate the impact of coal enterprises’ vertical integration on the performance of innovation corporate social responsibility (ICSR) and to elaborate its specific transmission path through financing structure and market power. This paper takes the data of A-share listed coal company from 2008 to 2017 as samples, uses input-output table method to measure the degree of vertical integration, and explores the relationship between the four factors through multiple linear regression and Bootstrap method. We found that: (1) the vertical integration of coal enterprises has positive incentives for the promotion of ICSR. (2) Financing structure and market power play a chain intermediary role in this process of incentive. (3) In areas with high marketization process, vertical integration has more significant incentive effect on ICSR. The paper extends the research on the relationship between vertical integration and innovation, which provides a reference for the improvement of China’s supply-side reform and corporate social responsibility (CSR) fulfillment policy. It is helpful to promote the sustainable development of the coal industry, stimulate the innovation vitality of enterprises, and improve the fulfillment of CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creation of an Asian Monetary Fund might be a way to improve the financial safety net in Asia. This paper presents ideas for reforming the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM)--and its sister organization the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO)--to move Asia in that direction. Among the ideas presented are making the CMIM an international treaty-type organization with paid-in capital, improving indigenous surveillance and monitoring capacity and developing a conditionality framework, merging the CMIM and the AMRO, and creating new functions for a regional stability mechanism such as macroeconomic stabilization. Much of the analysis focuses on Europe, which may have lessons to teach on matters such as transparency and accountability, the dangers of an improperly designed monetary union, the role of the IMF in the global financial safety net, the importance of regional leadership, and the necessity of taking into account local conditions in designing new institutions or initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges dominant governance paradigms by exploring the world of infrastructure investment, referred to by the industry as the 'infraspace'. Starting with financial institutions and multilateral development agencies that steer global infrastructure money, it will trace the financial, technical, bureaucratic and aspirational journey of infrastructure and infrastructure planning. Examining the sociofinancial architecture of infrastructure and development pulls into focus the relationship between states, state-owned enterprises and multilateral financial institutions. Rather than focus primarily on the social and cultural consequences of infrastructural change, however, or how the political promise and aspiration of infrastructure measures up to its everyday use, the point of departure for this paper is the social, economic and political relations that produce infrastructure. Such an examination requires a journey beyond the state and through infraspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are pleased to announce the Special Issue on the New Challenges in Asian Capital Markets in the International Journal of Financial Studies. The focus of papers in this Special Issue is on the future challenges and/or future developments Asian Finance. In addition, one article provides a review of the literature on certain issues in relevance to the banking and capital markets in Asia. This Guest Editor's note synthesizes the contributing authors' propositions and findings regarding these challenges and developments and hopes that opens new venues for future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issues on the restrained revolution of the newspaper industry in Asia. Press Foundation of Asia director Amitabha Chowdhury says that Asian newspaper is unable to maximize its revolution as it lack some powerful catalysts including lower newspaper price, market identification, and media design. It states that despite having press freedom, some constitutions in Asia are being suspended for emergency conditions; thus, shows press freedom to be on the hands of the government. It adds that the industry also faces economic problems such as finance for newsprint, modern equipment, and their own plants and the purchasing power of customers. It explores the conditions of newspaper industries in various Asian countries including Burma, Ceylon, and Philippines.

Based on the calculation of the inclusive financial development level of 22 provinces and 4 municipalities in China from 2004 to 2017, this paper uses the Kernel density estimation method to further analyze the evolution of the inclusive financial index. Based on the above analysis, we make empirical analysis of the impact of China's inclusive financial inclusion development index on farmers' entrepreneurship using static panel and dynamic panel estimation method. The empirical conclusions show that there are certain differences in inclusive financial inclusion development level in various provinces in China. Improving the inclusion development level of inclusive finance can better promote farmers' entrepreneurship. Urbanization level, economic openness and regional economic development level have a significant positive effect on farmers' entrepreneurship, while farmers' income and education level have a significant negative effect on farmers' entrepreneurship. It is possible to promote farmers' entrepreneurship by improving the inclusive development level of inclusive finance, combining urbanization, increasing government investment in productive fixed assets, increasing economic openness and improving regional economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Due to globalization, textile small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operations have become complex which raised the needs of risk-free financing solutions to support the SMEs' daily processes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of supply chain (SC) finance, a risk-free financing solution, on SC effectiveness (SCE) in the context of textile SMEs by employing transaction cost (TC) approach. Design/methodology/approach: The participants of the study were recruited from textile SMEs through a structured questionnaire. The proposed model and structural relationships were assessed by employing AMOS 24.0. Findings: The results of this paper indicate that supply chain finance (SCF) has a significant effect on SCE. Furthermore, all proposed factors of SCF adoption have a positive and significant effect on SCF. Practical implications: This study helps the SMEs executives or owners to adopt SCF as a secure financing scheme to reduce the credit TCs, optimize the firm working capital, reduce the risk of default, and improve SC effectiveness. SMEs and suppliers can build strong relationships while adopting the findings of this study. SMEs can engage the suppliers to work under strategic alliance through negotiation, collaboration, and work digitization, and extend their payment terms while providing an opportunity to the suppliers to get their payment back before a fixed time through discounting from financial institutions as needed. Originality/value: The present study covered the gap related to SCF and SCE by identifying unique factors of SCF adoption which was ignored in the previous literature by employing TC approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research background: Microfinance institutions (MFIs) play an important role in alleviating poverty. Thus, MFIs should be efficient in order to ensure that their objectives on social welfare and financial performance can be achieved by identifying the potential determinants, specifically on social globalisation. Purpose of the article: This paper examines the impacts of the social globalisation dimensions of interpersonal, informational, and cultural globalisations on the financial and social efficiency of MFIs. Methods: The data period covered the years 2011-2018; the data set consists of 176 MFIs from six Asian countries. The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach was employed to examine the MFIs' efficiency levels. Generalised Least Square (GLS) regressions were used to analyse the impacts of social globalisation and other determinants towards the efficiency of MFIs. Findings and value added: Interpersonal globalisation had a significantly negative correlation with social efficiency, suggesting that increasing the number of foreigners in management intrudes on local managers' decisions. Informational globalisation had a significantly positive correlation with financial and social efficiency, which signifies that more information produces monopolistic profits in this industry. Finally, cultural globalisation had a positive correlation with social efficiency, demonstrating that a global trading culture improves the abilities and technological skills for labour development and enhances MFIs' social efficiency. In general, the Cobb Douglas Production theory explained the understanding of the impacts social globalisation has on MFI efficiency. Furthermore, the findings from this study could provide important scientific, practical gap and contribute new insights and implications to various parties. Firstly, governments or policymakers can establish effective national policies and strategies. Secondly, this study could support investors in monitoring and understanding the performance of MFIs. Finally, the research could fill scholarly gaps and uncover more potential factors that influence the efficiency of MFIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographic trends portend the rapid ageing of Developing Asia (DA), albeit at varying rates. This phenomenon, along with the need to extend coverage of social protection systems is likely to increase public and private expenditure on social protection, particularly for pensions and healthcare. This paper analyses the options for additional financing of social protection in DA. As total national and fiscal resources devoted to social protection increase, an important issue will be how the additional burden is shared between different sectors, and financing instruments. The paper, however, focuses on options to finance additional social protection expenditure. Three broad options are suggested: first, realizing efficiency gains in managing provident and pension fund organizations; second, design and service delivery innovations including better policy coordination and coherence within and amongst healthcare and pension programmes; third, developing capabilities to obtain resources from conventional and unconventional sources of budgetary revenue. The paper also stresses that complementary reforms in fiscal, labour market, financial and capital markets will be needed to manage rapid ageing in DA, and therefore the issue of ageing should be viewed as involving several economic and social arrangements, and not in isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on a study about the issues of international financial spillovers and identifies the effects of global financial crisis on the financial market in Asia. The author states that the slowing of the U.S. economy and energy and food price increases cast serious concerns on the future of economic growth in most economies. The author talks about two different views on the effect of the sub-prime crisis on the Asian financial market. The author discusses the growing participation of Asia in international financial markets.

This paper offers an informed commentary on the actual and potential impacts of the pandemic on financial markets, sector and centres, grounded in literature on financial centres, the state‐finance nexus, and trends affecting the landscape of finance since the global financial crisis. We expect a slowdown in new financial regulation, continued firm‐level consolidation, and a continued rise of business services related to finance. The application of new financial technologies is likely to accelerate, affecting retail banking in particular, but will not necessarily be led by FinTech firms. Local and regional financial centres are likely to face larger challenges than leading international centres. As the panic and partial recovery in financial markets in March and April 2020 highlighted the significance of the international monetary hierarchy, with the US$ in the lead, a radical shift of financial power to Asia seems unlikely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public pension burdens in most emerging Asian economies are still relatively small. However, there are a number of reasons to believe that they will increase markedly in the coming years. First, many Asian economies will face rapidly ageing populations, which will raise pension and other old‐age‐related spending dramatically. Second, as economies develop, political pressures to expand the coverage of public pensions and raise pension benefits will likely increase. The first objective of this paper is to identify the potential fiscal burden of public pensions in 23 emerging Asian economies, based on econometric models and forecasts of GDP and demographic trends. Using two different methodologies yields estimated increases in the average share of public pension expenditures in GDP of 1.0 percentage point and 3.6 percentage points by 2030 compared with current levels. We believe the latter estimate is more realistic. The second objective is to recommend policies to provide adequate funding for public pension needs, including enhancing the efficiency of social insurance programs, improving the balance of revenues and expenditures, implementing more explicit fiscal rules and frameworks, and establishing stronger fiscal surveillance at the national and regional levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is divided into three parts as follows. The first part explains why Taiwan was relatively unscathed by the Asian Financial Crisis, including the short term countermeasures that were taken. The second part examines the role of short-term capital flows in the emerging market economy, and the third part concludes the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of the shared prosperity goal by the World Bank in 2013 and Sustainable Development Goal 10, on inequality, by the United Nations in 2015 should strengthen the focus of development interventions and cooperation on the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution. This paper contributes to the incipient literature on within-country allocations of development institutions and assesses the geographic targeting of World Bank projects to the bottom 40 percent. Bivariate correlations between the allocation of project funding approved over 2005–14 and the geographical distribution of the bottom 40 as measured by survey income or consumption data are complemented by regressions with population and other potential factors affecting the within-country allocations as controls. The correlation analysis shows that, of the 58 countries in the sample, 41 exhibit a positive correlation between the shares of the bottom 40 and World Bank funding, and, in almost half of these, the correlation is above 0.5. Slightly more than a quarter of the countries, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, exhibit a negative correlation. The regression analysis shows that, once one controls for population, the correlation between the bottom 40 and World Bank funding switches sign and becomes significant and negative on average. This is entirely driven by Sub-Saharan Africa and not observed in the other regions. Hence, the significant and positive correlation in the estimations without controlling for population suggests that World Bank project funding is concentrated in administrative areas in which more people live (including the bottom 40) rather than in poorer administrative areas. Furthermore, capital cities receive disproportionally high shares of World Bank funding on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops two-stage inverse data envelopment analysis models with undesirable outputs to formulate resource plans for 16 Chinese listed commercial banks whose outputs are increased and overall efficiency is kept unchanged in the short term. We use these models to meet three different output targets, namely, increasing both the desirable and undesirable outputs by the same percentage, increasing these outputs by different percentages, and increasing only the desirable outputs while keeping the undesirable outputs unchanged. We find that operation cost and interest expense are more flexible than labor in the adjustment process and that deposits have no obvious law of change. The findings of this work provide some suggestions for bank managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) attempt at a definition, it refers to innovations that "intentionally or not, contribute to a reduction of environmental impact in comparison with alternative practices", (OECD, 2009). (2018), but changes in data and time period mean that whereas the former paper finds that annualized EAMFP is very similar in South Korea and China, the latter concludes that at 9.46% per annum Chinese growth is more than double the rate of 4.36 from its smaller neighbor. Environmentally adjusted multifactor productivity: Methodology and empirical results for OECD and G20 countries. [Extracted from the article]

This paper is a tentative endeavor to delineate the potential of the renminbi to become a global currency. It first analyzes the critical economic, financial and policy attributes that are required to support a currency to gain an international role. It then examines whether China has the potential to acquire these attributes. The paper concludes by offering some provisional observations on the implications for Asia and the global economy, should the renminbi evolve into a world currency in the coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

n last the two decades, Western scholars have pointed to East Asian achievements which seem to be a kind of economic ‘miracle’. However, with the 1997 financial crisis, the conventional wisdom about economic dynamics in the region requires some rethinking. The Asian financial crisis is the first development-related crisis caused by economic liberalisation and globalisation and reveals an institutional shortcoming of Asian capitalism. Developmental states in the region generally adopted mercantilist development policies and encouraged private businesses to over-expand and over-invest without considering the change of international market competition. Although political institutions effectively fostered economic development under state autonomy, their economic bureaucracies lacked the administrative capacities to regulate financial institutions and to exert financial allocations into productive industrial sectors. Most importantly, the developmental model has fundamentally undermined the risk management capability of bureaucracies dealing with financial turmoil. This paper argues that Asian countries should build a financial governance regime that can effectively control, regulate and manage capital formation mechanisms and, most importantly, lead domestic and foreign capital to competitive sectors rather than to speculative ones, particularly, when exposed to foreign capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Asian financial crisis, which violently thwarted the east Asian miracle in the summer of 1997, has subsequently led east Asia to the building of a new financial architecture. This paper argues that the new financial architecture, modelled after the globally influential, market-centred US system, clashes with Japan's regionally active, state-centred financial system. And it explores the implications of these two financial systems for urban development in Asian capital cities. The paper concludes that Asian capital cities will do better with the state-centred financial system than with the market-centred financial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though a deeper financial integration and higher economic and financial stability are the prime goals of many Asian policymakers, no researcher has studied the relationship between integration and (in)stability in Asia. To fill this gap in the literature, this paper investigates the causality between financial integration and macroeconomic and financial instability. To this end, we use the Generalized Method of Moments to estimate a set of dynamic panel data models for a block of Asian countries over the period 2000–2017. Our estimation results show that there is a bidirectional causal relationship between financial integration and instability in Asia. Moreover, we find that financial integration causes instability in output and credit markets. The overall results show that macroeconomic and financial instability in Asia leads to financial disintegration. More specifically, the volatilities of the exchange rate and output growth cause financial fragmentation. Furthermore, we underscore the role of coordinated fiscal and monetary policies in offsetting the adverse effect of financial integration on macroeconomic and financial stability in Asia. Finally, the global financial crisis of 2008 has increased financial disintegration and instability in Asia. Our findings might help Asian policymakers to choose their policy targets when integrating into the global financial system. • There is bidirectional causality between financial integration and instability. • Financial integration leads to instability in output and credit markets in Asia. • In general, economic and financial instability leads to financial disintegration. • The volatilities of exchange rate and output growth cause financial fragmentation. • Coordinated policies might offset the adverse effect of integration on stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Asian Finance Association. The Asian Finance Association will hold its 2005 Annual Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on July 10-13,2005. For more information on the meeting and online submission of papers, visit the Financial Management Association web site.

This paper explores the international capital mobility in North Asia (South Korea and Taiwan), South Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) and India. In particular, the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, which states domestic investment and savings are highly and positively correlated, was examined for cointegration using an autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing procedure. The results did not show a positive correlation between savings and investment. There was essentially no relationship at level between savings and investment in all eight cases. Thirteen out of 16 structural break tests or 81.25% indicate no structural breaks. The analysis concluded with certain limitations that there is high capital mobility in the economies under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERVIEW: In today's competitive environment, the ability of an organization to innovate is paramount. While most organizations have flashes or spurts of innovation, only a handful have been able to innovate on a continuous and sustained basis. This paper surveys the challenges faced by firms when trying to build sustainable innovation programs. These findings have been derived from an examination of innovation programs in over 30 organizations in North America, Europe and Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the regional and industry-specific approaches to financial supply chain management, an area that has become more important as entities may be struggling to secure short- and medium-term funding, and is increasingly being seen as a method of leveraging stable business relationships — between, for example, large buying organisations and their suppliers — in order to achieve cheaper financing and improved payment terms. When implementing supply chain finance schemes, a key challenge for banks and third-party service providers is how to accommodate the differing requirements of clients from a range of industry sectors. This helps companies in different industry sectors meet the needs of their clients as they interact with their respective trading partners. Additionally, with the nature of global trade changing, certain parts of the world, such as Asia, are increasingly becoming the manufacturing centres of the world — producing capital as well as consumer goods. Banks and associated service providers — as well as senior corporate finance and procurement executives — will benefit from understanding and addressing these differences and structuring their strategies and solutions accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how Taiwanese overseas investment creates an ethnic Chinese skilled labor market in Asia. Low costs, no language barrier, and the cultural "lived Taiwan experience" are the benefits. Through three different channels--internal corporate transfer, social networks, and placement agencies--skilled labor from the People's Republic is mobilized to work overseas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been claimed that Asia lags behind the rest of the world in the privatization of airports. At the same time, the air transport sector has been growing quickly and this has placed enormous pressure on airport infrastructure. This paper reviews the situation and finds that the private sector is involved extensively with new airports and the upgrading of existing airports in Asia. Although the models used to accommodate the private sector appear similar to those used elsewhere, governments in Asia have retained majority control in every case. Despite the fact that some governments say that efficiency is important to them, the most common and important motive in “privatization” in Asia is to mobilize a new source of finance. Airports remain high on the agenda of public policy. Governments are concerned about abuse of monopoly powers and they want to cross-subsidize regional airports, but they lack the institutional strengths to regulate effectively. By retaining majority control, however, governments risk losing the efficiency benefits of privatization. The paper explores the reasons why airports are such difficult cases to deal with and concludes that there is a greater need than ever to be able to compare the performances of airports. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Prior to the Asian financial crisis, it was accepted wisdom to compare the growth of Latin America unfavourably to that of a selection of East and Southeast Asian countries (the so-called high performing Asian economies). This paper presents statistics that indicate that the differences in performance may have been less than as commonly presented. A modified Harrod–Domar model is applied to the Latin American countries, and the results suggest that a major determinant of slower growth in Latin America was the debt service burden. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malaysia gained attention for its use of capital controls in 1998, but since the early 2000s it has emphasised its commitment to an open capital account, despite experiencing volatile capital flows. As well as opting for financial openness, Malaysia chose to manage the value of its exchange rate after de-pegging from the US dollar in 2005. In a bid to escape the macroeconomic constraints that arise from capital mobility, Malaysia also chose to sterilise a large portion of capital inflows. It then made a further choice to use market-based sterilisation instruments more than regulatory sterilisation measures. These choices have carried costs and led to a build-up of economic risk. Three interrelated factors explain these choices: Malaysia’s strategy to manage the stigma arising from its imposition of controls in 1998, the increased level of financial integration that followed from this strategy, and the politically privileged position of groups that have benefitted from Malaysia’s commitment to capital openness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Finance has become a crucial agenda in climate change negotiations in recent years. Meanwhile, multilateral negotiations on climate change as a whole are making meager progress, and increasingly observed are activities by national governments and transnational non-state actors. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how investment towards low-carbon development could be materialized in Asia. A thorough review of current financial assistance for developing countries in Asia was conducted, and the amount of funding proved to be relatively modest to achieve the aim. We then examined financial policy instruments that could be implemented in the region. We estimated that USD125–149 billion per year would be needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the region by 2035. We also estimated that more than a half of this amount of funding could be achieved by public sector if several key policy instruments were agreed upon and enacted at regional and national levels in Asia. The role of private sector investment was also found to be indispensable in fulfilling all the long-term investment needs related to climate mitigation in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorism and security threats are global phenomena. Almost every region has been affecting by different terrorism and violence incidents; that is why terrorism has become a devastatingly global concern for the past two decades. This paper examines the socio-economic and fractionalization (Internal and External conflicts) determinants of terrorism and its related incidents using the Global Terrorism Database for 14 countries of East, South, and North Asia (ESNA) from 2006 to 2018. By applying the one-step system GMM estimation, the results show that among ESNA, South Asia is the most vulnerable region where population and state legitimacy are the most ignite factors of terrorism incidents. However, in East and North Asia, the education budget's socio-economic disparity is the foremost determinant of terrorism and related antagonism. It also analyses that the fractionalization elite acts as a mechanism to ignite terrorism incidents in ESNA. It further revealed that State legitimacy, Fractionalization Elites, population growth, and budget allocation of health and education are the significant determinants of terrorism in ESNA. The study concludes that terrorism and its related activities have different trends depending on region to region, referencing study results. Furthermore, this study suggests that the United Nations and other governing bodies should play their role to resolve the socio-economic incongruence in ESNA and effective regional conflict resolution strategies to make it a peaceful and affluent region. In combating socio-economic disparities and conflicts, a prudent and effective regional policy should be enforced. • Impact of socio-economic determinants on terrorism incident is evaluated in ESNA. • Impact of fractionalization elites on terrorism incident is examined in ESNA. • Terrorism and its related activities have different trends from region to region. • South Asia is the most vulnerable region to terrorism due to state illegitimacy. • East and North Asia expose to terrorism due to socio-economic disparity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ground-breaking research on the electricity sector and its effects on energy efficiency (EE) in advanced and emerging economies are crucial in developing a futuristic pathway, leading to self-sustainable energy use. Therefore, this research investigates the functions of sustainable investments to ensure EE in advanced and emerging economies in a decade, ranging from 2008 to 2018, by applying the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. The findings reveal a lower degree of EE in advanced and emerging economies (0.44), discovering only seven nations, saving energy with DEA and the West Asia and North Africa groups as the top energy savers. Moreover, the mean EE ratio of the advanced and emerging countries plummeted, dating back to 2013, whereas financial investment positively impacts EE. Similarly, the study perceives how open structures in the nations' economic systems can advance ecological conditions by reducing pollution levels and graft enable EE and reduce pollution levels. Simultaneously, natural resources and technological advancements can accelerate the course of EE and ecological dimensions. Therefore, analysis of causality reinforce the response hypotheses between EE, Environmental carbon emissions levels, financial advancements, graft control, proceeds from mineral resources, technological creativity, commerce, and localization of industries, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been shifts in the composition and nature of development finance in Asia, such as the mainstreaming of private sources of finance and the emergence of domestic resources potentially available for development purposes. In parallel, new trends and challenges are identified in such areas as the transformation of development aid, public-private partnerships, and green finance. A common challenge is how to strengthen financial intermediaries for longer term sustainable financing from domestic and external sources for investment serving development purposes. To address this, policymakers should bear in mind policy coherence and consistency from macro, sector, and micro perspectives. For various financial resources to bring about tangible benefits, policymakers should take account of complementarities and synergies among the full range of available financial resources. The effective utilization of private sources of finance depends on commercial viability. The key to success is incentive design and risk mitigation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper examines whether recently introduced “village funds,” one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds are analyzed in a cross-sectional approach in comparison to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that they reach the target group of lower income households better than formal financial institutions. Second, village funds provide loans to those kinds of borrowers who tend to be customers of informal financial institutions. Third, village funds help to reduce credit constraints. Thus, village funds provide services in the intended direction, albeit to a seemingly limited degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently much of Asia is growing at an impressive rate, thus allowing for a very significant reduction in poverty and contribution to meeting the MDGs. One of the potential risks that could undermine continued rapid growth and poverty reduction in Asia is a financial crisis, especially if it spread through contagion from one country to another and/or if it occurred in a major country. This article summarises the strengths and potential financial vulnerabilities in Asia, which are the focus of this IDS Bulletin. One potential vulnerability is linked to a source of strength: the region's high levels of international reserves. This has contributed to excessive liquidity, which has been a major factor behind bubbles in the stock markets of several Asian countries. The article also highlights new policy challenges, such as the risk of an abrupt unravelling of global imbalances, which may drastically change the prospect for developing countries and Asia in particular. Another challenge is the explosive growth of derivatives worldwide, and increasingly in Asia; this can pose new risks for the stability of the whole financial system and may have destabilising and pro-cyclical effects on key macroeconomic variables and thereby economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to explain the variation in U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America and Asia. The analysis focuses on 19 Latin American and Asian countries for the period of 1979-1999. The results show that the variation in the U.S. FDI can largely be attributed to the differences in fundamental economic and social factors such as market size, gross domestic product (GDP) growth, macro-economic stability, the degree of trade openness, and both school enrollment and infrastructure availability. Separating the data into two time periods reveals interesting results about the location decisions for U.S. investors. In addition, the results from the comparison between the two regions show that Latin American countries clearly attract U.S. FDI for different reasons than Asian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines knowledge production networks in the fund management industry. Focusing on Asian emerging markets (EMs), I explore how fund managers, brokers and research analysts utilise a combination of texts, analytical structures, codified procedures, and social networks to generate interpretations and perspectives on Asian EMs. Utilising a process-based approach, I investigate how ‘EMs’ as an investment category is imagined and practiced by those in the fund management industry through knowledge networks and how such networks are produced and maintained. Discussions are drawn from interviews conducted with 22 EMs specialists in Singapore and London. I argue that Asian EMs have distinct characteristics that are acted upon and reproduced by finance workers in particular ways and that the acquisition and transfer of tacit knowledge takes on increased significance when codified knowledge structures are lacking. Actors in Singapore and London are also embedded in different knowledge networks, which offer different strategic advantages but, when taken together, form a complex and multi-layered knowledge production network of ‘imagineering’ Asian EMs from both within and outside of Asia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Investigates the relationship between international equity flows and returns in Asia. Volatility effects; Financial crisis period effects; Feedback trading.