Search

The impact of Covid pandemic is inequitable on countries of the world. While some countries have rebounded despite a severe case of pandemic influence, such as the US, some others did not receive as hard a shock of the disease. In this paper, the authors focus on the Covid-19 effects on macroeconomies of the US, Canada and Mexico - three countries that signed the newly adopted Free Trade Agreement after North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It is seen that the Covid effects are drastically different in these economies, with the US getting the worst of it. Policies adopted were precautionary in Mexico, but quite liberal in the US and Canada. The trade agreement clauses had to be either modified or completely discarded. The immigration problem at the southern border of the US has added more burden on the trade agreement. The paper discusses these aspects.

The focus of businesses has shifted from acquiring new customers to placing greater emphasis on retaining customers through relationship marketing. However, currently, there is limited knowledge on Relationship Marketing Instruments (RMIs) that are appropriate in managing customer relationships. This paper aims to explore and empirically test the dimensions of RMIs that are appropriate in managing customer relationships. First, it reviews the concept of RMIs and its important dimensions, followed by reports on the construction and validation of the measure of RMIs. The existing literature on this topic have hypothesized five dimensions of RMIs; however, an exploratory factor analysis discovers that RMIs consist of eight dimensions. The final part of the paper discusses the implications of the findings and directions for future research.

The issues of international stock market linkages have already been investigated over the time. Many researchers and economists are concerned about the relationship between the Asian stock markets and others after the Asian Financial Crisis. This paper aims to examine the interrelationship between the Asian stock markets namely, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, China, Japan, Korea, and the US stock markets. The data consists of weekly stock indexes. The total samples are separated into three subperiods. First period is pre-crisis period spanning from January 1990 to June 1997. Second period is during-crisis period spanning from July 1997 to June 1998. Third period is post-crisis period spanning from July 1998 to February 2009. The empirical results show that the number of significant cointegrating vector is higher during the crisis periods compared to other periods. Granger-causality based on Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) showed that stock markets of Thailand, Japan and China are exogenous before, during and after the crisis respectively. This paper concludes that the linkages between the Asian and the US stock markets are stronger in the post-crisis period.

In Malaysia, the issue of economic convergence is much debated. Despite various Malaysia Development Plans for the past three decades, regional disparity among states persists. Therefore, the objective of the present paper is to address the question whether the state of Kedah has been converging, catching up or falling behind other states in Malaysia. The panel unit root test results, obtained using the annual data for the period 1961-2003, suggest that the state of Kedah has been catching-up with other states. In this respect, the local government has an important role to play in enhancing the growth by continuously providing stable economic environment for investment and other productive economic activities.