Digital gaming culture in Vietnam: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

New information and communication technologies continue to spread rapidly into the Asian marketplace, which has led to new patterns of leisure consumption, one of the most popular being digital gaming. However, in Vietnam there is limited research on gaming as a leisure activity. The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of digital gaming in Vietnam to better understand how it is practiced in this culture. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-five gaming industry figures and gamers. Thematic analysis was used to guide data collection and analysis. The findings indicate that glocalisation, socialised gaming practices and competitiveness characterise the Vietnamese gaming experience. The distinct culture of Vietnam combined with globalised gaming consumption habits has created new modes of play culture, and hence leisure experiences that are growing in pervasive and influential ways.     

Global and Euro Imbalances： China and Germany

We analyze global and euro area imbalances by focusing on China and Germany as large surplus and creditor countries. In the 2000s, domestic reforms expanded the effective labor force, restrained wages, shifted income toward profits and increased corporate saving. As a result, the Chinese and German current account surpluses widened, and that of Germany has proven more persistent, with subdued domestic investment. China is an early-stage creditor, holding a short equity position and a longposition in safe debt. Germany＇s balanced net debt and equity claims mark it as a mature creditor thatprovides insurance to the rest of the world. China pays to lay off equity risk, while Germany, by contrast, harvests a moderate yield on its net claims. In both economies, the shortfall of the net international investment position from cumulated current account surpluses arises from exchange rate changes, asymmetric valuation gains, and, in Germany＇s case, credit losses.     

Is integration I(d) applicable to observed economics and finance time series?

The method of cointegration in regression analysis is based on an assumption of stationary increments. Stationary increments with fixed time lag are called ‘integration I(d)’. A class of regression models where cointegration works was identified by Granger and yields the ergodic behavior required for equilibrium expectations in standard economics. Detrended finance market returns are martingales, and martingales do not satisfy regression equations. We ask if there exist detrended processes beyond standard regression models that satisfy integration I(d). We show that stationary increment martingales are confined to the Wiener process, and observe that martingales describing finance data admit neither the integration I(d) nor the ergodicity required for long time equilibrium relationships. In particular, the martingales derived from finance data do not admit the time (or ‘space’) translational invariance required for increment stationarity. Our analysis explains the lack of equilibrium observed earlier between FX rates and relative price levels.     

ARCH and GARCH models vs. martingale volatility of finance market returns

ARCH and GARCH models assume either i.i.d. or ‘white noise’ as is usual in regression analysis, while also assuming memory in a conditional mean square fluctuation with stationary increments. We will show that ARCH/GARCH is inconsistent with uncorrelated increments, violating the i.i.d. and ‘white’ assumptions, and violating finance data and the efficient market hypothesis as well.     

The Euro and the Dollar, 1998

There is no immediate prospect for the euro to become an anchor currency outside Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Still, a successful euro could deepen European financial markets and attract more international investment to the euro area. The prospect of substantial portfolio shifts into the euro, however, does not justify forecasts that the new currency will appreciate against the dollar over an extended time horizon. Liability managers outside the euro area should also find the enhanced liquidity and improved diversification possibilities of euro-denominated debt attractive.     

Managing the Dollar Over Its Cycles

Atlantic Economic Journal - The United States has ceded to the rest of the world managing the dollar’s value. For a generation, the U.S. authorities have all but withdrawn from the foreign...     

RENMINBISING CHINA'S FOREIGN ASSETS

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, China has rolled out a number of initiatives to actively promote the international role of the renminbi and to denominate more of its international claims away from the US dollar and into the renminbi. The present paper discusses the factors shaping the prospects of internationalising the renminbi from the perspective of the currency composition of China's international assets and liabilities. These factors include, among others, underlying valuation and management of the renminbi.     

The Global Domain of the Dollar: Eight Questions

Atlantic Economic Journal - Since the late 1950s, the rest of the world has come to use the dollar to an extent that justifies speaking of the dollar’s global domain. The rest of the world...     

Empirically based modeling in financial economics and beyond, and spurious stylized facts

The discovery of the dynamics of a time series requires construction of the transition density. We explain why 1-point densities and scaling exponents cannot determine the class of stochastic dynamics. Time series require some sort of underlying statistical regularity to provide a basis for analysis, and we construct an exhaustive list of such tests. The condition for stationary increments, not scaling, determines the existence of long time pair autocorrelations. We conjecture that for a selfsimilar process neither the pair correlations 〈x(t)x(s)〉 nor the 2-point density scales in both times t and s except in a pathological case, and give examples using three well-known Gaussian processes. An incorrect assumption of stationary increments can generate spurious stylized facts, including fat tails. When a sliding window is applied to nonstationary, uncorrelated increments then a Hurst exponent H_s = 1 / 2 is generated by that procedure even if the underlying model scales with a Hurst exponent H ≠ 1/2. We explain how this occurs dynamically. The nonstationarity arises from systematic unevenness in the traders' behavior in real time. Spurious stylized facts arise mathematically from using a log increment with a ‘sliding window’ to read the series. In addition, we show that nonstationary processes are generally not globally transformable to stationary ones. We also present a more detailed explanation of our recent FX data analysis and modeling.     

Transforming Central Bank Liabilities into Government Debt: The Case of China

Where policy has substantially increased central bank assets, the corresponding liabilities present an opportunity to increase the breadth, depth and liquidity of the government bond market. In China's case, transformed illiquid central bank liabilities could double or triple the stock of government bonds. Central bank liabilities can be transformed into government bonds either through the government's purchase of foreign exchange reserves held by the central bank or by the government overfunding its borrowing requirement and depositing the proceeds in the central bank. The overfunding approach is preferred if, for financial stability reasons, it is judged prudent to leave the central bank with sufficient resources to serve itself as lender of last resort in foreign currency to the banking system. In the case of China, public debt consolidation could also contribute to further liberalizing the Chinese banking system, wider international use of the renminbi and more balanced holdings of key currency government bonds.