Determinants of foreign banking activity in Malaysia

This paper studies the factors which determine the level of activity of foreign banks in the Malaysian economy, in the contect of the policy framework laid down by the central bank of the country. The authors conclude that, with trade financing as the the main activity of foreign banks, they did not benefit much from the growth of the economy per se. What has actually happened is that the business growth of domestic banks has been at the expense of foreign banks

A fractional cointegration approach to empirical tests of PPP: new evidence and methodological implications from an application to the Taiwan/US dollar relationship

This paper applies a relatively new concept of fractional cointegration to shed some light on the validity of purchasing power parity as a long-run equilibrium condition, using the Taiwan/US dollar exchange rate. Findings suggest that, while standard tests of cointegration fail to support cointegration between nominal exchange rates, domestic and foreign prices, the fractional cointegration analysis permits deviations from equilibrium to follow a fractionally integrated process and hence captures a much wider class of parity or mean-reversion behaviour. The paper concludes by indicating areas in which fractional cointegration will be a particularly appropriate technique to unearth previously unfounded temporal characteristics

Long distance behavior of the four-dimensional nonlinear sigma model with anomaly

We study the low energy behavior of the four-dimensional nonlinear sigma model with anomaly using the 2+ expansion and renormalization group methods. It is shown that the theory has a non-trivial ir stable fixed point, in addition to the usual trivial fixed point. If pions happen to exist in the non-trivial phase, their propagator would scale at low energies with anomalous exponents

Path integral derivation of the U(1) Kac-Moody characters and of the Weyl-Kac denominator

The U(1) Kac-Moody character functions are derived from a path integral expression. It is shown that point-split regularization of the Virasoro generator also exactly regularizes the path integral. An exact derivation of the Weyl-Kac denominator is then given for an arbitrary Lie group using the semiclassical approximation and the results of the U(1) calculation

The Malaysian economy: Pacific connections

This book examines the importance of the Pacific region to the Malaysian economy. Particular emphasis is placed on the contributions of the Pacific to Malaysia's trade expansion and industrial development through foreign investment. The book also traces the trends in the Pacific, discusses the possible impact of such trends on the Malaysian economy in the years ahead, and draws policy implications for the 1990s and beyond

Welfare implications of interest-free bank asset management

This paper introduces some theoretical aspects of Islamic banking asset management strategies for reducing economic instability. Since public welfare deteriorates during periods of inflation and unemployment, the procyclical behavior of modern interest-based commercial banks is known to aggravate these fluctuations and ipso facto produce an even more severe impact on welfare. The paper will show that equity-based Islamic banks contain some structural features that reduce these procyclical tendencies and therefore shield public welfare from further deterioration

Theoretical studies in Islamic banking and finance

Islam proposes that the banking systems that operate on the basis of an ex ante fixed rate of interest be replaced by a profit-sharing system in which the rate of return to the financial resources is not known and is not fixed prior to the undertaking of the transaction. While in Islam interest is forbidden, trade and profits are permissible and in fact encouraged. The papers in this volume all address one or more of the basic questions at the theoretical level. They represents a start in the attempt to introduce rigor into the analysis of Islamic banking and finance, thereby clarifying the nature of the basic relationships underlying the system

CES production function: estimates of elasticity of substitution, returns to scale and technical progress in Australian manufacturing industries

This paper attempts to estimate (i) the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour (ii) returns to scale and (iii) Hicks-neutral disembodIed technical progress in Australian twelve (two digit) manufacturing industries as well as total manufacturing during the period 1968/69 through 1977/78. The method employed to derive the above estimates was the constant elasticity of substitution (C.E.S.) production function. Time series data have been used in that connection. Subject to the limitations of the study, the relative orders of magnitude of the estimates appear to be plausible