Forecasting corporate financial distress in the Southeast Asian countries: A market-based approach

This study is conducted to investigate the prediction of corporate financial distress based on the Merton (1974) market-based Distance to Default (DD) model over the period from 1997 to 2016 which covers a range of economic financial circumstances, including the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) and Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The study focusses on the six largest countries in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), comprising of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unlike previous studies which focus mainly on bankruptcy, this paper focusses on early warning distress indicators that signal distress well before bankruptcy. This is when firms experience difficulty in servicing debt as measured by interest coverage ratio (ICR) at a firm level and non-performing loans (NPLs) at a country level. Key empirical findings from this paper indicate that the market-based distance-to-default (DD) model is generally a good early warning indicator of financial distress in the following year, particularly for ICR, but that prediction accuracy varies between individual countries in the Southeast Asian region.     

Good global citizen? ASEAN’s image building in the United Nations

ABSTRACT

Based on role theory, the article examines the images that ASEAN member governments project of their organization. It rests on a discourse analysis of 198 speeches in the United Nations General Assembly between 1998 and 2017. Findings suggest that ASEAN does not figure as a top priority for delegates and that an overarching ASEAN role conception is missing. However, their addresses reveal parameters on which a collective role conception can be built. Individual ASEAN countries undertake great efforts to project themselves as ‘good global citizens,’ a role conception that could also be applied to ASEAN.     

Capital market integration in ASEAN: A non-stationary panel data analysis

Motivated by the establishment of ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at the end of 2015, we examine saving-investment relationship in various subgroups of ASEAN to assess their capital market integration. The results from second generation panel unit-root and cointegration tests that account for cross-sectional dependence as well as estimates of long-run saving-retention rate provide some evidence of market integration in ASEAN. The analysis of short-run dynamics suggests that capital mobility in ASEAN during 1980–2014 appears similar to that in OECD countries during 1970–1999. More importantly, across different panel estimators and subgroups of membership, there is considerable heterogeneity among the member countries. The saving-investment association is very weak, thereby implying very high capital mobility, in more developed members such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei; the association is very strong, implying very low capital mobility, for much less developed members such as Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The results call for renewed effort to develop capital markets in less developed nations and integrate them with the rest of the membership in ASEAN. In this paper, we also address several major shortcomings of the original Feldstein-Horioka framework.     

Does forced migration increase regional human rights commitment? The cases of Malaysia and Thailand in ASEAN

ABSTRACT

Why do non-democratic governments commit to human rights on a regional level? We argue that the negative externalities of political repression, operationalized as large amounts of transnational refugee flows, affect states’ willingness to commit to human rights. Neighbouring governments commit to human rights to send a signal to their repressive neighbours that repression will no longer be tolerated. We use official UNCHR data, a number of other secondary sources, as well as congruence analysis and process tracing to demonstrate the relevance of the theory for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Malaysia and Thailand in particular.     

Growth and real business cycles in Vietnam and the Asean-5. Does the trend shock matter?

We examine Vietnam’s economy in comparison with its closest trade partners. We show that capital accumulation has been the primary growth engine since the start of its transition to the pro-market economy in 1986 – the Doi Moi. We also show that the cyclical behavior of its macro aggregates is similar to that of its ASEAN-5 peers and other developing countries. We extend the standard small open economy RBC model by considering habit persistence and government consumption, which allows a close match of the moments of the growth variables. At the business cycle frequency, transitory productivity shocks account for approximately one-half of Vietnam’s output variance, while country risk and non-transitory productivity shocks account to close to one-fifth each. Regarding the Solow residual’s volatility, we find that the trend component merely accounts for 12 % of this variance in Vietnam, while in Thailand it is only 6 %. These findings refute the “the cycle is the trend” hypothesis in Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) and align with the hypotheses in García-Cicco et al. (2010) and Rhee (2017), where the stationary component is overwhelmingly dominant. We claim that technological progress and productivity-enhancing measures are fundamental for Vietnam’s economy to sustain high growth.     

房地产投资的东道国选择分析——以东盟最大房地产企业新加坡嘉德置地为例

在世界经济全球化的大趋势下,许多房地产企业纷纷在世界各国进行跨国房地产投资。文章运用国际投资理论和房地产经济学理论探讨这些公司进行国际投资时的区位选择,在丰富房地产行业全球化理论研究的同时,在实践方面可能为我国房地产企业参与房地产行业的全球化,以及政府面对既要吸引外资、活跃对外经济贸易,又要有效监管维护经济平稳健康提供一定指导。新加坡的嘉德置地集团是东盟及亚太地区最大的跨国房地产企业,投资组合遍布世界20多个国家,尤以在东盟对话国家中国和澳大利亚的国际投资为多。分析嘉德置地的投资数据与此二国的经济社会变量之间的相关关系,可以在一定程度上揭示房地产企业在进行国际投资时选择东道国考虑的重点因素。     

广西发展与东盟国际物流业的SWOT分析

广西发展与东盟的国际物流业具有地缘、政策与发展物流业的内在需要等优势、也有交通设施不完善、物流人才缺乏、物流企业规模小技术落后等劣势,同时还有着中国东盟自由贸易区和泛珠三角组建的机遇,并与各种威胁挑战并存。     

中国与欧盟和东盟的贸易特点及影响因素比较——基于引力模型的实证分析

本文首先比较了中国与两大区域经济集团——欧盟和东盟的贸易特点,然后通过引力模型分析了影响中国与欧盟和东盟贸易的因素,并就各个因素所带来影响的不同进行了对比。结果表明,中国与东盟贸易的GDP弹性较大,而中国与欧盟贸易的人均GDP弹性较大。本文认为,前者的原因在于中国与东盟贸易更具潜力,后者主要是因为中国与欧盟的贸易互补性更强。     

中国和东盟贸易及产业比较优势研究

中国出口对东盟出口的影响既存在互补效应,又存在替代效应。随着中国和东南亚区域合作的不断扩大和深化,中国对东盟出口的增加会促进东盟国家同行业的出口。然而,中国对其他国家出口的增加则会挤出东盟各国同行业的出口。近年来中国出口和经济增长速度放缓,这既给东盟各国带来了新的发展机遇,又使得中国和东盟的区域合作面临挑战。东盟国家可通过进一步的贸易自由化、增加R&D投资和培训更多的熟练工人来提高其出口和贸易的国际竞争力。     

中国与东盟农产品贸易竞争关系——基于出口相似性指数的实证分析

本文利用出口相似性指数分别从产品和市场两个角度分析了中国与东盟国家农产品贸易竞争关系的强弱及其变化趋势。研究结果表明:中国与东盟国家农产品贸易的市场相似性指数高于产品相似性指数,农产品出口产品结构的差异决定了中国与东盟的农产品贸易关系不是以竞争为主;中国与东盟农业领域内的合作将有利于强化产品差异、缓解农产品市场竞争程度。