What affects the extent of business process management implementation? An empirical study of Malaysia’s manufacturing organizations

This study seeks to examine the factors that affect the extent of Business Process Management (BPM) among manufacturing firms in Malaysia. The factors comprised of internal and external drivers. Data was gathered from a survey of 200 manufacturing companies of which 59 respondents participated in this study. Our statistical results indicate that business environment is the key driver that affects the extent of BPM implementation, followed by organization strategy. The findings provide insight to managers that business environment, organization strategy and BPM programs are closely linked. To promote the adoption of BPM in Malaysia, these critical drivers should be emphasized.     

Are developing countries accumulating sufficient total factor productivity to sustain their economic growth and job creation? Empirical evidence from the Middle East and North Africa region

This study contributes new evidence on why the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has failed to create decent jobs for decades. The growth accounting exercise reveals that the region suffered from an acute total factor productivity (TFP) deficit in the 1990s; it improved remarkably in the 2000s, before deteriorating significantly in the period between 2010 and 2017. Throughout the three subperiods, the region’s growth relied heavily on capital accumulation. The severe deficit in TFP and the heavy reliance on physical capital for decades impaired the region’s ability to sustain economic growth and to create decent jobs in the long run. The study recommends more government interventions in knowledge accumulation as a critical precondition for employment generation in developing countries.     

Monetary Model of Exchange Rate for Thailand: Long-run Relationship and Monetary Restrictions

Abstract

This paper examines the long-run relationship between exchange rate and its determinants based on the flexible-price monetary model. The multivariate cointegration approach is adopted to attain our objective of this study. The empirical results provide evidence favoring the monetary approach to exchange rate for a small and open emerging economy, namely Thailand. In addition, the validity of the underlying assumptions of the monetary approach to the determination of exchange rate is established. The findings suggest that exchange rate players may effectively monitor and forecast the exchange rate movement via the money supplies, incomes, and interest rates variables of both Thailand and Japan. Besides, one has to follow the economic development of Thailand's major trading partner, Japan, to understanding the movement of exchange rate for Thailand. Moreover, our findings add new insights to accompany previous studies that documented the important influence of the US in the emerging Asian economies.     

Cash management in the travel and leisure sector: evidence from the United Kingdom

This study investigates the determinants of cash holdings for companies operating in the travel and leisure (TL) sector of the United Kingdom (UK) between 2005 and 2016. The study finds that growth opportunities, cash flow, and cash flow volatility affect cash holdings positively, while size, leverage, liquidity, asset intangibility and dividend payments affect negatively. Companies operating in the airlines sub-sector hold more cash, while companies in the hotels and restaurants and bars sub-sectors hold less cash than the reference sub-sector of travel and tourism. Except for the free cash flow model, the trade-off and pecking order models of cash holdings are empirically supported for the TL sector.     

The Determinants of Bank Capital Ratios in a Developing Economy

This paper reports new findings on the determinants of bank capital ratios. The results are from an unbalanced panel data set spanning eight years around the period of the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis. Test results suggest a strong positive link between regulatory capital and bank management’s risk-taking behaviour. The risk-based capital standards of the regulators did not have an influence on how regulatory capital is adjusted by low-capitalized banks, perhaps due to the well-documented banking fragility during the test period. Finally, bank capital decisions seem not to be driven by bank profitability, which finding is inconsistent with developed country literature that has for long stressed the importance of banks’ earnings as driving capital ratios. Although the study focuses only on one developing economy, these findings may help to identify the correlates of bank capital ratios in both developed and developing economies since this topic has received scant attention of researchers. These findings are somewhat consistent with how banks engaging in risky lending across the world could have brought on the 2007–2008 banking liquidity and capital erosion crisis.     

The stability of money demand in China: Evidence from the ARDL model

This study examines the demand for broad money (M2) in China using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration framework. The results based on the bounds testing procedure confirm that a stable, long-run relationship exists between M2 and its determinants: real income, inflation, foreign interest rates and stock prices. Importantly, our results reveal that stock prices have a significant wealth effect on long- and short-run broad money demand; its omission can lead to serious misspecifications in the money demand function (MDF). This finding is consistent with the notion that asset inflation (deflation) has systematic influence on the pattern of monetary aggregates.     

Dynamics of technology sharing cartels and industrial structure under a rule of thumb

We analyse the market effects of different degrees of knowledge transfer in a duopoly in which firms act following a rule of thumb. Three regimes are compared: the technology sharing cartels, the duopoly with spillovers, and the proprietary regime. We show the industrial structure evolution of these three regimes under different cost configurations when firms behave myopically, revising their production plan in each period according to the marginal profit previously gained. The analysis is conducted in a discrete setting using numerical simulations of finite difference systems. We show under which conditions knowledge transfer is beneficial to the system and can prevent market monopolisation.