Governing Enclosure: The Role of Governance in Producing Gated Communities and Guarded Neighborhoods in Malaysia

Enclosed residential areas are proliferating in Malaysian cities, in common with many other parts of the world. The production of gated communities and guarded neighborhoods in Malaysia reveals the active role of the state in creating conditions that support enclosure and securitization of space. This article examines the role of governance in producing residential enclaves that reinforce segregation and fragment urban landscapes. Based on a study of gated communities in Malaysia, we argue that governments, corporations and citizen groups collaborate within a complex governance system that (re)produces enclosure. Neoliberal market principles fuse with ethnic politics, cultural predilections and economic imperatives to generate a socially and spatially fragmented urban landscape where security concerns dominate and where citizens culturally, physically and symbolically segregate themselves from others.     

Modeling producer responses with dynamic programming: a case for adaptive crop management

Past research found agricultural producers’ conditional responses during the growing season are important adaptations to weather and other stochastic events. Failing to recognize these responses overstates the risks confronting producers and understates their ability to respond to adverse circumstances. Dynamic programming (DP) provides a means for determining optimal long‐term crop management plans. However, most applications in the literature base their analysis on annual time steps with fixed strategies within the year, effectively ignoring conditional responses during the year. We suggest an alternative approach that captures the strategic responses within a cropping season to random weather variables as they unfold, reflecting farmers’ ability to adapt to weather realizations. We illustrate our approach by applying it to a typical cereal farm in Karak, Jordan. The results show that including conditional within‐year responses to weather reduces the frequency of fallowing by 23% and increases expected income by 9%.     

Currency depreciation effects on ADR returns: evidence from Latin America

We use seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) and multivariate regression models (MVRM) in a panel sample of 74 American depository receipts (ADR) programs from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico during the period May 1994 to May 2009 to analyze the behavior of ADR returns during the 300-day period surrounding the currency crises breakdown in the originator??s country. Controlling for the underlying stock and local and host country equity indices, we find that ADRs generate significant negative abnormal returns during currency crises, due to translation exposure. Abnormal returns remain statistically significant even in crises triggered by currency depreciations as small as 3.6%. The results persist after including exchange rate returns as a control variable and after an orthogonalization procedure of exchange rate against local country indices. In agreement with ADR literature, our results show that ADR prices are determined primarily by the underlying stock, exchange rates, and host country index, in that order. Moreover, we observe how market integration has become evident in more recent times as the coefficients for the U.S. stock market have increased its contribution to ADR price discovery.     

Anticipated and unanticipated money: a case study of Malaysia

The paper tests the LSW proposition that unanticipated policy changes affect real economic variables by using Malaysian data over the period 1970:1–1990:4. The empirical evidence changes in fiscal policy and balance of payments do not affect real output, thus lending support to the proposition. On the other hand, anticipated monetary policy and inflation influence output in the short-run, lending support to Mishkin's views of the economy and rejecting the LSW proposition. In addition, the long-run neutrality proposition is not supported by the data. Moreover, unanticipated changes in inflation do influence real output in the short-run lending support to the LSW proposition. However, unanticipated changes in monetary policy, balance of payments and fiscal policy do not influence real output, lending support to the classical view of the economy and rejecting the LSW proposition. Furthermore, the Monetarist's view that inflation is a monetary phenomenon is rejected. The findings also show that unanticipated movements of money supply contribute significantly to the inflation rate. The Chow test shows that the coefficients remain stable over the period of study.     

A Takayama–Judge activity model applied to the analysis of allocation and trade in Sweden

The purpose of this article is to formulate a numerical general equilibrium model of the Swedish economy, and to use the model for a quantitative evaluation of the pattern of comparative advantages. The model is essentially a Leontief type of input-output model, extended with linear demand functions for final commodities, foreign trade activities and capacity and resource constraints. Due to the linearity the model can easily be reformulated and solved as a quadratic programming model. The evaluation of the pattern of comparative advantages of the Swedish economy is carried out as an analysis of the choice between inport and domestic production in a temporary equilibrium framework with exogenously given world market prices, exports and domestic production capacities.     

Determinants of retail bank choice in Nigeria: a focus on gender-based choice decisions

As the Nigerian retail banks customers become more sophisticated, it is now very important that retail banks determine the factors that are important and relevant to the customers’ retail bank choice decisions. By using a survey of retail bank customers, this study evaluates the relative importance attached to retail banks’ choice criteria used by male and female customers in Nigeria. The results show that there are some differences in choice factors used by male and female customers in selecting a retail bank for patronage. The recommendation is that bank managers should take both female and male market segments into consideration when making retail bank strategic planning in order to become competitive. The findings can assist retail bank managers in refining their marketing strategies as a means of overcoming the intense competition that exists in the Nigerian banking system.     

Impact of microcredit on borrowers’ expenditures: a fuzzy regression discontinuity design approach

This article uses the data from 69 villages in Bangladesh to estimate the effect of participation in microcredit programmes on household expenditures. A regression discontinuity design (RDD) is used to identify the credit effect. Our results show heterogeneous treatment effect on different types of expenditures. We show that access to credit reduces per capita expenditure on durable goods such as kitchen equipment, furniture, repair and maintenance of house and increases the expenditure on per school-going child. We also show insignificant impact of access to credit on non-durable goods and health care, recreation and gifts. Interestingly, our results indicate a positive impact of microcredit on village-level expenditures.     

China and India's insertion in the intellectual property rights regime: sustaining or disrupting the rules?

This paper looks at the insertion of China and India in the contested and highly legalised regime of intellectual property rights (IP). In doing so it pays particular attention at two dimensions, the internal adoption of this regime and external endorsement/contestation of international IP norms. Much has been written about whether emerging countries will challenge or support the maintenance of an open rules-based multilateral trade system. In this context, the differentiated integration of these two countries in the IP regime is notable. Domestically, China despite much criticism for widespread IP infringement has followed a maximalist interpretation of TRIPS. India, on the contrary has followed other emerging countries in pursuing a more critical, minimalist understanding. These positions have also been visible at the multilateral arena. This empirical finding runs contrary to the assumption that defiance results from market power. The divergence is the more surprising given a recent explosion of patent filings in both countries. From a political economy perspective, this should translate into support for stricter rules under TRIPS. In explanaining the two countries’ divertent insertion this paper looks beyond economic (market) power and domestic interests and underlines the role of ideational legacies, domestic interests and regulatory capacity. The paper thus stresses the need to look deep into domestic politics and ideational cleavages, as well as at their evolution over time, in order to better understand the international behaviour of emerging countries.     

Earnings response coefficient in the MENA region

This article documents the earnings response coefficient (ERC) for nonfinancial firms listed in the Middle East and North Africa region during the period between 2003 and 2013. Our results show significantly positive ERC for our sample firms. The results are robust across different countries and different industries. Our results also show that ERC increases with increasing the measurement interval. It indicates that more information is incorporated in prices as the measurement interval increase. Consequently, we argue that significance of reported earnings is higher for long-term investors in the MENA region.     

Natural resources and the tradeoff between authoritarianism and development

Why do African and Middle Eastern countries seem cursed by an abundance of natural resources yet USA, Australia and Norway seem blessed? A growing literature has argued that the benevolence or malignance of natural resources depends upon the quality of institutions. This paper offers a new explanation based on associational freedom and its interaction with the political system. The model predicts that natural resources have an adverse impact on economic performance and transition to democracy in authoritarian regimes but not in democracies. It also predicts that repression of associational freedom will be increasing in natural resources in authoritarian regimes. I test the model's predictions using fixed-effects regressions on an international panel from 1975 to 2000 and find support.