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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) of China on investment opportunities in five ASEAN economies. Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs advanced empirical approaches, such as Multivariate DCC-GARCH and Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) to test the research objective. The period of analysis involved monthly data from 2003 until 2019. Findings – This paper provides evidence where the Malaysian stock market to be the least exposed to risks emanating from Chinese EPU, followed by Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. Results for investment opportunities based on time horizon suggest, for a short-term holding period, investors are better off investing in Singapore and Indonesia, while, for medium-term holding periods, all ASEAN markets appear lucrative except for the Philippines. Practical implications – From a managerial perspective, the outcome or findings of this study are expected to aid the retail and institutional investors in designing better strategies on diversifying a stock portfolio with different holding periods. Originality/value – Theoretically, the findings of this study contribute fresh insights into an emerging strand of literature focusing on the transmission of regional policy. Methodologically as well, this study is a novel venture to the best of authors' knowledge.

Purpose – This paper examines factors that determine the unemployment rate in the Maldives. Methods – This paper uses an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model in capturing long and short-run associations among the chosen variables. It uses some macroeconomic variables, namely unemployment rate, population, economic growth, foreign direct investment, external debts, inflation rate, and expatriate workers. Findings – The empirical results suggest that except for expatriate workers, all the variables are significant determinants of unemployment rate in the long run. The study found that economic growth and inflation would negatively and significantly contribute to unemployment rate when they are combined. This explains the unemployment nexus which follows the Phillips curve and Okun’s law relationship provides the presence of both these hypotheses in the Maldives in the short-run and long-run. In addition, an increase in population and external debts worsens the unemployment situation in the Maldives. Although expatriate workers are not significant in the long run, the results reveal that they have a significant positive effect on unemployment in the short run. Implications – This result implies that the Maldivian government should encourage locals in the country to participate in the labor force and limit the participation of expatriate workers in an industry that has a shortage of skilled expertise. Originality – This study expands our understanding of key determinants of the unemployment rate in Maldives. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the pioneer empirical study to assess the issue.

The contribution of the agricultural sector towards East Java’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2008 recorded at 16.55%, however, it shrinks to 13.75% in 2015. This statistic shows the regressed contribution of the agriculture sector in comparison to other economic sectors. One common view that linked to shrinking in credit composition is due to the lack of credit accessibility for the sector. Given this issue, this paper attempts to propose a viable financing model to develop the agricultural sector in East Java known as Integrated Agricultural Land Crowdfunding Model (IALCM) using Islamic financing instruments in form of a crowd funding platform. This model is expected to offer farmers in East Java to meet their liquidity constraints and the Indonesian government to accelerate social entrepreneurship innovation. Lastly, several challenges and conceivable recommendations have been deliberated for the development of the agricultural sector in East Java.

The paper aims to investigate the determinants of dividend payout among the Malaysian property companies. The sample size consists of 30 property listed companies on Bursa Malaysia. The data are generally obtained from the company’s annual report for the period of 2012 to 2016. The study employs multiple regression analysis to examine the influence of firms specific and macroeconomic variables on dividend payout. Result of the test shows that the dividend payout has a significant negative relationship with ownership structure and positive relationship on return on equity, quick ratio and GDP. The study instigates to enrich the literature on dividend determinants especially in the context of Malaysia.

The future direction of the public university is to self-sustained due to the inconsistency of the national economic growth. For example, reduced in the national income has forced the Malaysian government to cut the allocation of funds to various ministries’ in 2016 compared to 2015 budget. The consequences of this phenomenon the government has reduced the allocation of budget to Ministry of Higher Education, which is cut by RM2.4 billion, from RM15.78 billion in 2015 compared to RM13.37 billion in 2016. This scenario has imposed various challenges to many public universities’ management to manage university expenses and explore new avenue to generate income. There are various ways to generate income and we find most of the tertiary education in Malaysia is not able to practice effective management especially in managing the cost of organizing a program. For example, food and beverages (F&B) spend by the university during events are not effective and most of the time is wasted. This argument is developed based on the observation and also supported by an informal interview with a vice-chancellor (VC) of one of the public university in Malaysia. The VC do agree that the university management needs to find a solution to overcome the issue of wastage due to the forecasted cost rather than an accurate cost to organize a university’s events. Therefore, we believe that the main issue faced the university’s management is to identify an exact number of participants and etc. Thus, the current practice is based on the forecasted estimation rather than accurate estimation. Therefore, to solve this problem, the present study aims to provide an opportunity to the tertiary education in Malaysia which able to estimate an accurate cost and at the same time able to create waqf fund using effective fund management approach by proposing awqaf alternative plan (AAP) model. The proposed model is expected to generate Waqf fund and eliminate wastage management practice.

This study is designed to examine the behavioural intention of micro enterprises to use the Integrated Cash Waqf Micro Enterprise Investment (ICWME-I) model as a source of financing in Malaysia. The primary data are collected from the survey administered to micro entrepreneurs in the Klang Valley and the analysis is conducted using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Furthermore, the model has validated its acceptance in the field by adopting the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA). This study has revealed that both the attitude and subjective norms are found to have a positive impact on the intention of micro entrepreneurs to use the ICWME-I Model in the context of Malaysia.

This study was designed to evaluate the service quality of Malaysian Islamic banking from the customer's perspective. The primary data was collected by administering survey questions in Klang Valley (Selangor and Kuala Lumpur), and the analysis was conducted using importance-performance analysis (IPA). The results revealed that service quality attributes such as Shariah requirements, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, website efficiency, and tangibility play an important role in determining customer satisfaction with Malaysian Islamic banks. These findings should assist market players, particularly the Malaysian Islamic banking industry, and policy makers in understanding and enhancing customer satisfaction regarding the quality of service offered by the Islamic banking industry in Malaysia. The research findings could also be used as part of the blueprints for market players to draft the necessary policies with regard to service quality of the banking industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]