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The systematic literature search on the fertility rate was performed on articles from the Web of Science compiled by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) to provide major publication characteristics. All articles related to Fertility from year 1980 to 2011 were analyzed with the bibliometric approach using non-parametrics techniques. Total Citation, Citation per year and Cited References were significantly different between the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s, with more than a 100% increase in the number of publication. The association between number of authors and citation per year were significantly weak. Number of publication in a journal posed a poor negative association with the citation per year. Similarity between Authors Keyword and KeyWords Plus® do not promote the increase in citation per year. The author’s affiliation and country of publication would be an interesting exploration for future fertility research. The bibiliometric analyses on Fertility is rather new and vital, as the key finding will provide researchers guidance in the literature search and future publication.

The issue of governance and armed conflict has been debated in recent years. Economists recognized that good governance is central to achieving higher economic development and also ending conflict. In this study, we investigate the effect of governance on armed conflict in 80 selected developing economies for the period 1996-2013. Using Logit model, we determine the response of armed conflict on six measures of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption in a panel setting. As control variables, we include polity, polity square, social polarization, population and rugged terrain in the model. Interestingly, our results strongly suggest that good governance does contribute to reduce armed conflict. All the governance indicators show significant and negative impact on armed conflict. Moreover, our results suggest that the dimension of political stability and absence of violence is the best governance tool to end armed conflict.

In recent years, studies have found that financial development affect the rate of fertility worldwide. Available theories linking fertility and the banking sector have contended that when financial intermediaries develop the share of employment in the modern sector rises and the fertility rate falls. With a well-developed financial system, firms will have easy access to the credit market, thus, enhanced production efficiency and firm can raise wages in the modern market. Families have a choice to move from the traditional market (high fertility rate, low wages) to work in the modern sector (low fertility, high wages). On the hand, financial development can affect fertility by reducing the importance of the old-age security motive. Families' access to the credit market will renders current consumption less dependent on current income. If current income depends on the number of children that they have, then the development of a banking system would then reduce parents' optimal number of children. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of financial development on fertility forselected developed and developing economies. In this study, we employ the fixed effects and random effects models using annual data ranges from 1980-2010. Our results suggest financial development affect fertility positively for the developed countries, but for the developing countries financial development adversely affecting fertility.

The systematic literature search on the fertility rate was performed on articles from the Web of Science compiled by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) to provide major publication characteristics. All articles related to Fertility from year 1980 to 2011 were analyzed with the bibliometric approach using non-parametrics techniques. Total Citation, Citation per year and Cited References were significantly different between the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s, with more than a 100% increase in the number of publication. The association between number of authors and citation per year were significantly weak. Number of publication in a journal posed a poor negative association with the citation per year. Similarity between Authors Keyword and KeyWords Plus® do not promote the increase in citation per year. The author’s affiliation and country of publication would be an interesting exploration for future fertility research. The bibiliometric analyses on Fertility is rather new and vital, as the key finding will provide researchers guidance in the literature search and future publication.

Present paper analyzes the interrelations between output, energy consumption, and carbon emissions in light of Malaysia’s development experience from a commodity-based economy to an industrial-based economy by means of a vector autoregression (VAR) framework. The results suggest substantial interactions among the three variables. Moreover, manufacturing output tends to exert persistent influences on carbon emissions, energy consumption, and non-manufacturing output. Meanwhile, the significant causal relations from non-manufacturing output to energy variables are found for first few years. These results are robust to the inclusion of additional variables – namely, trade openness, investment, and population – in the system.

Background: Developing countries have witnessed economic growth as their GDP keeps increasing steadily over the years. The growth led to higher energy consumption which eventually leads to increase in air pollutions that pose a danger to human health. People’s healthcare demand, in turn, increase due to the changes in the socioeconomic life and improvement in the health technology. This study is an attempt to investigate the impact of environmental quality on per capital health expenditure in 125 developing countries within a panel cointegration framework from 1995 to 2012. Results: We found out that a long-run relationship exists between per capita health expenditure and all explanatory variables as they were panel cointegrated. The explanatory variables were found to be statistically significant in explaining the per capita health expenditure. The result further revealed that CO2 has the highest explanatory power on the per capita health expenditure. The impact of the explanatory power of the variables is greater in the long-run compared to the short-run. Based on this result, we conclude that environmental quality is a powerful determinant of health expenditure in developing countries. Conclusion: Therefore, developing countries should as a matter of health care policy give provision of healthy air a priority via effective policy implementation on environmental management and control measures to lessen the pressure on health care expenditure. Moreover more environmental proxies with alternative methods should be considered in the future research.

This study explores the long run and dynamic relationships between the stock price of Cathay Pacific Airways and China Airlines against key determinants of financial risks exposure confronting the airline industry, which include interest-rate, exchange rate and fuel price risk exposures for the period of January 1996 to December 2011. The (Johansen & Juselius, 1990)cointegration technique was employed to detect any long time trending relationship followed Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and Vector Auto-Regression (VAR). The generalised forecast error variance decomposition and the generalised impulse response function were employed to comprehend the effects of theses financial risk exposures. Our empirical results suggest that exchange rate movements have a substantial impact, compared to the fuel price and interest rate exposures against the stock price of the analysed airline. Our findings play a pertinent role in the determination of the respective airlines foreign vulnerability and financial policies which would be helpful for industry players and policy makers from a financial stability perspective.

Foreign direct investment is regarded as a key element in globalization and international economic integration. Being an additional source of investment funding, it plays an integral role in the economic development of countries. This study investigates the relationship between English language proficiency and foreign direct investment in developing countries. The study used macro and socio-economic variables of foreign direct investment, level of English language proficiency, income per capita and unemployment. A sample of forty-nine (49) developing countries is used. The model was regressed cross-sectionally and White standard error was employed to remove traces of heterogeneity. As expected, it is found that there are significant relationships between (1) English language proficiency and foreign direct investment; and (2) income per capita and foreign direct investment. The results confirmed the importance of English language proficiency in attracting foreign direct investment into developing countries. It also provides some insights to designing of policies mainly to raise the level of human resources capabilities in terms of improved language proficiency to facilitate sustainable flows of investment from abroad.

This paper explores the link between the shadow economy and financial sector development in Malaysia for the period 1971-2013. We calculate the size of the shadow economy by using the modified-cash-deposits-ratio (MCDR) approach recently developed by Pickhardt and Sardia (2011). We investigate the contention made by Blackburn et al. (2012) that financial sector development can mitigate shadow economy – higher level of financial sector development lead to lower level of shadow economy. Our results show that there is a non-linear long-run relationship between shadow economy and financial sector development in Malaysia, an inverted-U shape curve, suggesting that at lower (higher) level of financial sector development commensurate with higher (lower) level of the shadow economy. One policy implication from this study is that the financial sector can play an important role in reducing shadow economy by improving the accessibility to financing and to the credit market.

This paper examines the vulnerability of domestic prices against oil price shocks by considering the direct and indirect effects of oil price on consumer price index, which occur through the known channels of the monetary transmission mechanism. We consider interest rate, exchange rate, domestic credit, and share price during the periods before and after the global crisis of 2007–2009 in the ASEAN-4 (Association of Southeast Asian Nations- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand) countries. Using the structural vector auto regression model and monthly data (2002 month 1–2013 month 4), the results indicate that pre-crisis—with the exception of Indonesia, which is not much influenced by oil prices—there is no indirect influence, but there is a considerable direct effect of oil price on consumer price index for all countries. Post-crisis, the oil price transmits strongly to consumer price index indirectly, although the direct effect of oil price on consumer price index is still extensive. Policymakers can target domestic prices via share prices and exchange rates.

Openness to trade has been one of the primary drivers stimulating growth.The goal of this particular study is to investigate the relationship between trade openness and economic growth in 87 selected countries which includes both Organizations for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and developing countries for 1977–2011 periods.We used two measures of trade openness i.e. the ratio of trade openness (TO) typically spoke by exports plus imports in nominal value divided by GDP (nominal)which is commonly used in the literature,and trade openness in real(RO)which is defined as the sum of imports and exports in US$ relative to GDP in purchasing power parity US$ (real GDP). An empirical studywas conducted to determine the causal relationship between trade openness and growth in a panel perspective.We used a dynamic panel data estimation method i.e. the general method of moments(GMM). The empirical results reveal a bidirectional causal relationship for both developing and OECD countries.Our finding is consistent with the endogenous theory that increased openness leads to higher growth, which thus prompts expanded openness.

The present paper investigates the impact of financial development on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the agricultural sector in Nigeria. In an agricultural dependent economy such as Nigeria, the nation depends on the agriculture sector to feed its growing population and to foster economic development. However, in this study, we consider CO2 emission from the agriculture sector to be the indicator for the environmental quality. We posit that like any other developing economy, there is a role play by the financial sector to promote growth and progress in enhancing economic development. The pursuit for economic development will ultimately result in environmental pollution. We employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach on annual data spanning from 1971-2011. The control variables included in this study comprises national income, energy consumption, foreign direct investment and population. Our results suggest that all variables exhibit long-run relationship with CO2 emissions from the agricultural sector. Financial development and national income show negative relationship with CO2 emissions from agricultural sector, suggesting that economic development has not taken place at the expense of CO2 emissions. However, the increase in population and foreign direct investment has led to an increase in CO2 emissions from the agricultural sector.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to relate the quality of governance with crime in Malaysia. The study also identifies the best good governance tool to fight against crime in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses time-series data on crime rates and six measures of governance: voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption. In this study the authors employed the popular autoregressive distributed lagged modeling approach to estimate the long-run model of crime and governance. Findings: The authors test the hypothesis that good governance lowers crime rates (total crime, violent and property crimes). The results suggest a negative relationship between crime rates and good governance in Malaysia. This suggests that good governance reduces crime rates in Malaysia. Research limitations/implications: The limitations of this study is the short time-series used in the analysis which is from 1996 to 2009. Practical implications: This study provides evidence that the practice of good governance, for example, lower corruption, good policing and judicial system can mitigate crime in Malaysia. Social implications: The implementation of good governance will protect property right of individuals, business sector and the society as a whole, and this will enhance prosperity of a nation. Originality/value: This study provide the first empirical evidence that linking between crime and good governance in Malaysia.

This paper examines the potential impacts of minimum wages on poverty alleviation in Malaysia by paying specific attention to its impacts between major ethnic groups. Our model assesses both the impacts on total incomes (and its distribution) and expenditures caused by price increases in response to higher labour costs. For all ethnic groups, results show that minimum wages lead to a reduction in poverty. Poverty reduction is mainly explained by an increase in total income rather than a shift in income distribution. Among the ethnic groups, poverty for ethnic Indians is reduced the most by increases in minimum wages compared to that of the Malays and Chinese. The differences in poverty reduction can be explained by the limitation of minimum wages to promote wages of informal workers among the Malays and Chinese. Therefore, minimum wages could be more effective as a poverty reduction tool if informal workers are covered in the scope.

The study explores the home field, global advantage, and liability of unfamiliarness hypotheses in the Malaysian banking sector. The results indicate that Malaysian banks have exhibited productivity progress mainly attributed to technological progress. The authors find negative relationship between foreign and government ownership and bank productivity. Likewise, the publicly listed banks have been relatively less productive compared to private banks, thus rejecting the market discipline hypothesis. The empirical findings suggest that foreign banks from the North American countries to be the least productive banking group lending support to the home field advantage and the limited form of the global advantage hypotheses.

This study investigates the motivation for religious demand among Christians using the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data on Religion for 2008. This study using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis identified two motives, afterlife motive and the current life motive that influences demand for religion. The afterlife motive, aligned to the Christian doctrine of belief in afterlife, heaven and hell, was one of the dimensions of motives for religious demand. For gains in the current life, although the various studies highlight two construct of personal gains and social gains, however, for this study, all items loaded onto only one construct, which is broadly termed as current life motives where religion is said to provide solace, inner peace; as well as social support and networking opportunities.

The present study attempts to investigate whether shadow economy and the tourism sector are related. In the European countries, Schneider reported that 20 to 25 per cent of the shadow economy is represented in the tourism-related industries – wholesale and retail, automotive and motorcycle sales and maintenance; transportation, storage and communications; and hotels and restaurants. For the tourism sector, the services given by operators (unregistered and/or underreporting) operate in the shadow economy will ultimately wiped off the map of high quality tourist destinations and destroyed the development of the tourism industry itself. This study examines the short-run and long-run relationships between international tourism receipts and shadow economy for 149 countries over the period 1995-2008. We use a generalized one-step error-correction model (ECM) in combination with a system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) to explore the long-run relationship between these two variables. Our results suggest that tourism receipts and shadow economy are cointegrated. This implies that shadow economy and the tourism industry worldwide are related in the long-run. The long-run elasticities indicate a negative impact of the shadow economy on the tourism sector suggesting that increase in shadow economy activities will adversely affecting the tourism industry.

The purpose of this study is to investigates the impact of tourism on biodiversity loss in a sample of 141 countries. In the analysis, we measure tourism using the numbers of international tourist arrivals, while biodiversity loss is proxy using the numbers of threatened species – birds, fishes, mammals and plants.We also include GDP per capita, population growth, protected areas, and crop production, which act as the control variables.We find that using robust standard error estimator the number of international tourist arrivals, population growth rate, protected areas and crop production increases the numbers of threatened species, while GDP per capita reduces the numbers of threatened species.One policy implication of this study is that since businesses in the tourism industry depend on the very existence of biodiversity, then biodiversity conservation should become the essential factor for business sustainability.

Tourism has been an important sector by contributing government revenues, national income, foreign exchange earnings as well as provides job and business opportunities for many nations. In 2013, international tourist arrivals reached a record 1.1 billion arrivals worldwide, with USD1.2 billion in international tourism receipts. At the same time,the shadow economy in the tourism sector also flourishes. In the European countries, Schneider reported that 20 to 25 percent of the shadow economy is represented in the tourism-related industries – wholesale and retail, automotive and motorcycle sales and maintenance; transportation, storage and communications; and hotels and restaurants. Services given by these operators (unregistered and/or underreporting) will ultimately wiped off the map of high quality tourist destinations and destroyed the development of the tourism industry itself. This study examines the short-run and long-run dynamics between international tourists’ arrival and shadow economy for 141 countries over the period 1995-2008. We use an error-correction model (ECM) in combination with a system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) to explore the long-run relationship between these two variables. Our results suggest that tourists’ arrival and shadow economy are cointegrated. The long-run coefficients indicate a negative impact of the shadow economy on the tourism sector. This implies that shadow economy matters for the tourism industry worldwide.

This paper examines the impact of oil price, as a cause of economic crisis, and monetary policy through the four known channels of monetary transmission mechanism (interest rate, exchange rate, domestic credit, and stock price). Using a structural vector autoregression model based on monthly data from 2002 to 2013 for Association of Southeast Asian Nations-4 countries, oil price and monetary transmission channels are compared pre- and post-crisis. The result indicates oil price remains an important factor in explaining price volatility, even though oil price has a weaker effect compared to a stronger effect of monetary transmission mechanism on prices. Stock price for Malaysia and domestic credit for the three others can affect the prices against oil price shock. Unlike prices, the output of all countries except Thailand is more affected by oil price post-crisis compared to pre-crisis. Different monetary transmission tools affecting industrial production are compared for the four countries.

This study seeks to investigate the economic antecedents of happiness by employing the Mean Group (MG), Pooled Mean Group (PMG) and the Dynamic Fixed Effects (DFE) estimators to analyse a set of macro panel data on selected OECD countries for 40 years from 1973 to 2012. The results show evidence that income and unemployment have a favourable impact on happiness, while happiness is hindered by inflation and income inequality. Surprisingly, the study revealed that institutional quality is not a significant antecedent of happiness. It is worth noting the importance of the reference group theory or relative theory of happiness and the set-point theory of happiness in explaining the role played by income, unemployment, inflation, income inequality and institutional quality in explaining human well-being.

This article investigates the channels of monetary transmission mechanism alongside oil price and the US industrial production, as two causes of recent crisis, during the pre-and post-crisis of 2007-2009 in thailand. the channels of monetary transmission mechanism barely have an effect on consumer price index and industrial production while oil price strongly affects both industrial production and consumer price index and the US industrial production robustly influences consumer price index during pre-crisis. However, oil price and the US industrial production greatly lose their effects on consumer price index and industrial production after the crisis period, the oil price is still mostly explains the variation of the consumer price index. The stock price is most effective conduit for monetary policy to industrial production during post-crisis period.

In many organizations, different performance measures were employed to assess different aspects of managers’ performance. Some of the measures were yet to be developed, some developed but only in a very selective way, and some already presented but not adopted or only partly used. At the same time, management accounting systems might have the potential and capability of providing necessary information for planning, decision making and motivating managers’ performance. Hence, this study examined the effect of the adoption of performance measures and management accounting system in enhancing the managers’ performance in Malaysian local government. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey of 131 heads of departments in Malaysian local government. A structural equation modelling technique was utilised to examine the mediating effects of performance measures and management accounting system on the relationship between budgetary participation and managerial performance through a path analysis. The findings showed that the adoption of performance measures and management accounting system had strengthened the relationship between budget participation and managerial performance. The findings pointed to the practical relevance of the performance measures and management accounting system to the current management setting of government organizations.

The misalignment of exchange rate is the normal phenomenon in currency’s behaviour for a country. The traditional theory of exchange rates in determining the misalignment of the currency is the Law of One Price (henceforth LOP), where the price levels would be the same between two countries after converting their price into a common currency.However, this model does not take into account the economically interesting question of whether a particular exchange rate is driven by macroeconomics fundamentals.Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigates the behaviour of exchange rate movement in Malaysia and identify the determinants of macroeconomics fundamentals on the exchange rates for this country.By using fundamental equilibrium exchange rates (FEERs) model, this study adopts the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) to examine the long run relationships (or cointegration) among the variables and the dynamic effect within variables in the short run.

The objective of the present paper is to address the question whether the less developed states, namely; Kedah, Kelantan, Pahang, Perlis, Sabah, Sarawak and Terengganu are catching-up with the more richer state of Selangor, using the generalized one-step error-correction model for the period 1970-2013.We tested convergence on real GDP and per capita real GDP for the states involved and the results suggest that the less developed states has been converging to the state of Selangor for the period under study. In this study, we also determine the time required for the less developed states to converge to the level of economic development of Selangor.In terms of real GDP, the less developed states will take longer to converge to the state of Selangor, however, in terms of per capita real GDP, the less developed states can converge at a faster rate to the level of economic development of Selangor if these states can grow more than double than the growth in Selangor.In this respect, the state government has an important role to play in enhancing growth by continuously providing stable economic environment for investment and other productive economic activities. This will ensure full convergence can take place at a faster rate in the future.

Generally, Malaysia must reached the minimum level outlined by world bodies such as the OECD, World Bank and United Nations to be classified as a developed country.Therefore, states that target to become developed state status also needs to reach the minimum level stipulated by the world bodies for inline recognized as a developed country. The progress to be achieved by Malaysia is not limited to economic and social, but also includes spiritual, psychological and cultural community. Malaysia target was stated in the 9 challenges of Vision 2020, which to create a united Malaysian nation.Therefore, the objective of this study to measure the nationalism index of Malaysian people towards the establishment of 'bangsa Malaysia' as set out in Vision 2020.The study involved 504 respondents from five less developed states in Peninsular Malaysia, namely Kedah, Perlis, Pahang, Terengganu and Kelantan.A structured interview technique using a questionnaire was conducted to qualitatively determine the public perception of the formation of the Malaysian nation.Data was analyzed using fuzzy sets approach.The results showed that the index of nationalism and unity of Perlis residents higher than other states.