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ABSTRACT This paper empirically examines the dynamic stock return-volume relations for six emerging Asian markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Evidence is found that trading volume Granger causes stock return in quantiles and the causal effects of volume are heterogeneous across quantiles. This shows that volume carries some information to the return and could be interpreted in light of theoretical models. In addition, we find that there is bi-directional causality between stock return and trading volume in most of the markets. The finding indicates that those Asian emerging markets with different institutions and information flows than more mature markets have present similar causal effects on the stock return-volume relation. Furthermore, the cross-country evidence shows that the US market helps to predict the returns of the emerging Asian markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropes of borderlessness are pervasive both in discourses concerning the spread of HIV/AIDS and the Growth Triangle, a transnational economic zone that ideally binds together the Indonesian island of Batam, the Malaysian province of Johor and Singapore. This paper considers how the emergence of HIV as a problem in the Growth Triangle, and on Batam in particular, has been framed as a problem to be addressed in context of the nation-state rather than as a transnational problem that demands cooperation across borders. In conjunction with this, it focuses on further attempts to create boundaries around HIV, through the identification of risk groups, the localisation of prostitutes and the distribution of condoms. The paper focuses particular attention on the relationship between Batam and Singapore, and how non-governmental organisations and governments have dealt with HIV/AIDS issues in both places. Furthermore, it problematises these activities by paying ethnographic attention to other forms of cultural and economic logics that often are odds with prevention models. This raises important questions concerning, most specifically, the problems of HIV prevention and cross-border cooperation, and, more generally, the regulation and formation of new kinds of borders in a‘borderless world’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-border tourism is often proposed by governments as an incentive for economic growth, but critics have suggested that its impacts are, in fact, overplayed. This paper presents research in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle (IMS-GT). It examines the broad economic impacts of Singaporean cross-border tourism on local host communities in two locations: Kukup, a traditional Malaysian fishing village in Johor, southern Peninsular Malaysia, and Bintan in Riau Islands Province in western Indonesia. The study found that cross-border tourism generated income, employment and some local economic linkages. In Kukup clear economic benefits with increased income and employment were unevenly distributed between ethnic groups. The Bintan enclave development had some linkages to the island economy but was reliant on immigrant labour. Cross-border ethnic ties, particularly Chinese, also played an important role in the growth of tourism in the IMS-GT. The paper shows that cross-border tourism can be a useful addition to more conventional forms of international tourism within national tourism planning and could lead to significant economic benefits for local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross-border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of‘globalization’. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross-border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo-economics of intra-regional competition), land (including post-colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the‘borderless world’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Asian countries experience small real exchange rate appreciations or even a real depreciation despite a fast growth in tradable productivity. A key-characteristic of these countries is that they are constrained on capital inflows. Is the Balassa–Samuelson theory still valid in those countries? Are there other factors likely to explain real exchange rate (RER) changes? To address these questions, we develop a two-sector model in which a small open economy faces a constraint on capital inflows. In this setting, the RER does not only depend on productivity, but also on other factors like the rate of time preference, the age dependency ratio or the level of the external constraint. A calibration of the constrained economy model seems to match at least qualitatively empirical evidence for China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, between 1970 and 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Singapore-Indonesia-Malaysia Growth Triangle has been applauded by the governments of the three nation states, economists and transnational corporations as an economic success. However, other stark realities are evident at the local level as well. The Growth Triangle is supplanting older cultural and economic geographies. This has given rise to struggles over rights to territories and resources. Of the three points in the triangle, it is the landscape of Riau-Indonesia that has been transformed most dramatically. A comparative study of the cadastral maps of the administrators of the Growth Triangle versus the community maps of the indigenous peoples shows the differences in their perceived spatial ideas of Riau. It also highlights the different systems of knowledge as upheld by the administrators in contrast to that of the indigenous inhabitants. This comparative study brings to attention the issues of knowledge construction, mapping knowledge and the politics of mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]