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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to decompose total factor productivity (TFP) changes of the agriculture sector in ten African countries. Design/methodology/approach A fixed-effects estimation is applied to estimate the translog production function. Findings The study results are consistent with previous studies, indicating low TFP. Furthermore, of the TFP components, only technical change (TC) is positive. This study proposes that credit be made available to farmers in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Furthermore, agricultural development programs should be implemented in South Africa and Senegal to improve TFP in these countries. Originality/value This study measures the following TFP components for the African agriculture sector: TC, technical efficiency, and scale effects.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the significant factors determining foreign direct investment (FDI) in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (ASEAN3) and Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore (ASEAN5).Design/methodology/approach– This paper applies the first differencing technique to estimate the parameters on the constructed panel data starting from 2000 to 2011.Findings– Due to the different stages of economic development between ASEAN3 and ASEAN5, the determinants of FDI are different. We found that there are significantly positive effects of infrastructure facility, level of openness, and negative effect of inflation on FDI inflow in ASEAN3; while real exchange rate, gross domestic product and net official development assistance have no effect on its FDI. The finding in ASEAN5 showed that market size and infrastructure facility are significant factors to attract FDI. Furthermore, even though there are an increase in inflation rate as well as a decrease in level of openness measurement, ASEAN5 are still attractive to foreign investors.Originality/value– The time variant and invariant unobserved effects that are ignored in the previous studies are considered in this study.

This paper assesses the effects of ASEAN5's international trade on their level of employment. By applying the labor demand model of Greenaway et al. (1999), we classified ASEAN5's international trade into two cases: (1) intra-ASEAN5 trade and (2) trade with the world market. Our estimated results show that an increase in intra-ASEAN5 imports reduces their level of employment, but that intra-ASEAN5 exports have no effect on employment. In the case of world market trade, ASEAN5's world imports (exports) have a positive (negative) effect on employment depending on the sort of trade.

This article investigates how the price indices of major cities of the US respond to the shock from a city and from monetary policy. We find that the crisis of Bretton Woods system in 1968 and the oil crisis in 1974 should be incorporated as structural breaks in monetary policy variables and price indices. Using cointegration technique with structural break in our aggregated data, we find that the average half-life is 1.75 years, which is closer to what some of others found in disaggregated data, and that the interest rate is an effective tool for controlling cities’ price in short run.

To cope with the Asian Financial Crisis, Thai commercial banks have gone through a reconstructing period. This study aims to decompose the Total Factor Productivity growth (TFP) for Thai commercial banking industry with an output distance function. With an unbalanced panel dataset, we used the Fixed Effect (FE) model with Instrumental Variables (IV) to estimate the TFP growth empirically. We found the technical inefficiency change and scale effects were the two major contributors to the recent growth, while the input price effect of the premises and equipment was the major preventer of the growth. Moreover, the Thai commercial banking industry produced in decreasing return to scale, and the input–output allocation was not at the profit maximization optimum under the exogenous prices.

This article extends the theory of generalized purchasing power parity (G-PPP) by developing a model including foreign variables such as the real money supply, output and interest rate. A cointegration rank test with two structural breaks in the deterministic trend was adopted to selected Asian countries, with Japan as the base country. There were two cointegrating vectors and six common stochastic trends in the model. The cointegrating vectors were estimated by the same approach used by Pesaran et al. (2000). The first cointegrating vector is interpreted as G-PPP, and the second one is interpreted as the extended G-PPP. According to G-PPP, these countries could form a single currency area. The first stochastic trend is primarily driven by Japan's real money supply; the second, third and fourth by the real exchange rates of the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, respectively; the fifth by Japan's output; and the sixth by Japan's government bond yields.

In this paper, we derive an inverse input demand system and apply cointegration analysis to the imported factor demand of Thai industry. We found one cointegrating vector and six common stochastic trends. All short-run flexibilities are less than one.

3, 47, NIDA Development Journal