Do Macroeconomic Variables Contain Any Useful Information for Predicting Changes in Hospitality Stock Indices?

This article examines the relationship between macroeconomic and the hospitality stock variables using the vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling approach. The empirical results based on the U.S. data show that the hospitality stock indices largely follow an autoregressive process, and they are not entirely independent from some key macroeconomic variables. Specifically, the BOND variable explains a substantial proportion of the forecast error variance among the stock indices for restaurants, lodging, and casinos. The consumer price index, money supply, and industrial production variables, however, provide a relatively smaller contribution toward explaining the forecast error variance in these hospitality stock indices.School of Hotel and Tourism Managemen

The Middle-Income Trap: Issues for Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations

The problem faced by many of the economies making up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is whether they can avoid the middle-income trap and advance to the high-income level. What is needed for them to avoid the middle-income trap? This paper attempts to answer this question by building an analytical framework based on the factors that determine each development stage of an economy, and by comparing the current situation of four ASEAN middle-income countries with the experience of the Republic of Korea, a country that managed to overcome the middle-income trap and reach the high-income level in the late 1990s. The paper concludes that for ASEAN middle-income countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand) to avoid the trap, they should strengthen research and development capability, emphasize the quality and appropriateness of human resources, and improve the institutional system for nourishing a dynamic private sector. These efforts can be expected to result in dynamic changes in the structure of comparative advantage toward higher skill and more innovation-intensive contents of products. For a low middle-income country such as Viet Nam, reforms and policies to increase the productivity of capital, land, and other resources are essential to avoid the early appearance of the trap

Floating without flotations-the exchange rate and the Mexican stock market: 1995-2001

Pegged exchange rates in capital importing countries partially 'socialised' the risks of international borrowing. A corollary of managed floating, therefore, is a reallocation of risk bearing to private capital markets. Equity finance offers explicit risk sharing but Mexican experience since 1995 confirms that it may not expand spontaneously under a floating regime, despite buoyant international conditions. As an explanation for this disappointing outcome, the analysis highlights the implications of managed floating for equity demand when corporate debt is high. Policy must recognize that while firms need to reduce gearing, investors may not be attracted to the shares of indebted companies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.