Innovation and Economic Growth in Malaysia

Since independence in 1957, Malaysia has transformed significantly from an economy based on primary commodities to one fuelled by manufacturing and services based on foreign investment.. Besides Malaysian economy has achieved steadily high growth for over five decades. However, after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the growth of Malaysian economic slowed and the downturn remains until the 2008 global financial crisis made matters worse. Currently, Malaysian economy give some hints of recovery, but there is still concern that the recovery might be challenging. The reason is that Malaysia has lost its comparative and competitive advantages in several products to some new developing economies opening up and joining the trend of export-led growth. In addition, it cannot compete with developed countries with new technologie

Diagrammatic-based Query Formulator

Database is a valuable asset of any organization. Working with database has become more and more frequent and necessary. Unfortunately, the current applications only support users with text-based queries which users have to input manually. No ad-hoc queries can be done unless the application user has some knowledge of SQL Queries. Consequently, this web-based application is developed as a tool for users to easily manipulate database. This application will present database as structured diagrams. This will allow users to have a concise and clear view of database. Besides, this application also supports real-time interaction, which will enable users to query the database interactively and visually. As a consequence, less time and effort will spent on querying database to get the required data

Diagrammatic-based Query Formulator

Database is a valuable asset of any organization. Working with database has become more and more frequent and necessary. Unfortunately, the current applications only support users with text-based queries which users have to input manually. No ad-hoc queries can be done unless the application user has some knowledge of SQL Queries. Consequently, this web-based application is developed as a tool for users to easily manipulate database. This application will present database as structured diagrams. This will allow users to have a concise and clear view of database. Besides, this application also supports real-time interaction, which will enable users to query the database interactively and visually. As a consequence, less time and effort will spent on querying database to get the required data

Quasi-optical Measurement for Low Loss Material Characterization in Submillimeter Wave Range

An accurate knowledge of dielectric constant of materials is required in many sub-millimeter wave applications. Free-space measurement of materials has always been one of the first choices due to their non-destructive nature and relatively simple sample preparation. However, free-space measurement systems at sub-millimeter frequency range suffer from two main problems: high loss because of divergent beam pattern and diffraction when the beam waist of the radiated beam is relatively large compared to the size of the sample under tests. In order to mitigate these issues, we set up a quasi-optical system using off-axis parabolic mirrors, which enhance the dynamic range and accuracy of the system. Mirrors are preferred over lenses because of their very low absorption loss. Signals from 75 GHz to 750 GHz are generated by using a vector network analyzer and a frequency extender system in six bands. Our setup consists of a pair of horn antennas operates as feed for two off-axis parabolic mirrors. Once a collimated beam is generated, we measure its characteristics using Gaussian beam mode analysis. The sample under test is then inserted midway between the two mirrors where the beam is collimated. We have measured electric permittivity of material like high-density polyethylene and polypropylene and our results highly agree with already published papers. In the future, we would like to measure some less well-known materials to see if they are suitable for sub-millimeter electronics applications

Effects of bribery on natural resource efficiency in Vietnam: moderating effects of market competition and credit constraints

This article uses small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) survey data in Vietnam from 2007 to 2015 to examine the effects of bribery on the natural resource efficiency of firms facing credit constraints and market competition. We also employ the disaggregated resource intensity by water, fuel, and electricity. Creditconstrained firms are broken down into those who have had formal loan applications denied (credit rationed) and those who do not apply for formal loans due to either the process being too difficult or the interest rate being too high (discouraged borrowers). Applying instrumental variable method to take into account the endogeneity problem, the empirical results provide evidence to support the ‘sanding-the-wheels of resource efficiency’ hypothesis. Among the three natural resources, inefficiency is most evident in water consumption. Furthermore, the effects become more sizable for micro-sized and informally registered firms since they have a lower bargaining power vis-a-vis public officials. Credit constraints and market competition pressure can reduce a firm’s ability to use natural resources efficientl

Welfare consequences of inconsistent monetary policy implementation in Vietnam

We develop a New Keynesian model featuring Calvo price setting and Calvo wage setting to quantify the welfare consequences of shifting trend inflation in Vietnam. To capture the characteristics of the Vietnamese economy, we use the Simulated Method of Moment and calibrate parameters jointly to match the important selected moments of Vietnamese data. The results show a severe consequence of a constant positive trend inflation and an exogenous shock to trend inflation, especially when a central bank sets a high level of inflation target. Among staggered price and wage contracts, the latter play a vital role in transmitting the adverse impacts of constant and shifting trend inflation into the economy. Based on our analyses, raising inflation targets would seem to be a bad policy prescription in Vietnam

Effects of R&D, networking and leadership roles on environmental innovation adoption in Vietnam’s SMEs

Although small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) constitute a majority of firms, they still have little knowledge about environmental issues and generally encounter difficulties when integrating environmental aspects into their activities. Similar arguments are also highlighted by Ha et al. in the case of Vietnam. This paper, therefore, builds a guideline for promoting SMEs’ organisational environmental innovation adoption based on Environmental Standard Certification (ESC) by investigating the effects of R&D, networking, and leadership roles in Vietnam. By using SME survey data in Vietnam from 2011 to 2015, the empirical results show that R&D spending and organisational capabilities proxied by already owning ESC are positively associated with green innovation implementation. We also find that either collaboration with different partners, including competitors, banks, and public agents or communication networks, affects firms’ decisions on green innovations. The demographic characteristics of managers such as gender, educational level, and knowledge about the environmental laws play determining roles in these decisions. Finally, we advanced the literature by indicating the moderating effects of men in leadership roles and leaders with better related knowledge on the impacts of firms’ internal resources (R&D) and firms’ international orientation (export)

CHARACTERISTICS OF 7th GRADERS IN THAI NGUYEN CITY (VIETNAM) FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF DIFFERENTIAL LEARNERS IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION ACTIVITIES

Differentiated-oriented physical education (PE) helps learners to participate in learning activities with content and form suitable to their individual characteristics. Capturing the individual characteristics of learners is of great significance in the process of physical education. Through document research, interviews, pedagogical observations and examination, the research assesses the characteristics of 7th graders in Thai Nguyen City from the perspective of differential learners in Physical Education. This is an important basis for organizing physical education activities in the direction of differentiation for 7th graders in Thai Nguyen City.  Article visualizations

Improving Zero-shot Translation with Language-Independent Constraints

An important concern in training multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) is to translate between language pairs unseen during training, i.e zero-shot translation. Improving this ability kills two birds with one stone by providing an alternative to pivot translation which also allows us to better understand how the model captures information between languages. In this work, we carried out an investigation on this capability of the multilingual NMT models. First, we intentionally create an encoder architecture which is independent with respect to the source language. Such experiments shed light on the ability of NMT encoders to learn multilingual representations, in general. Based on such proof of concept, we were able to design regularization methods into the standard Transformer model, so that the whole architecture becomes more robust in zero-shot conditions. We investigated the behaviour of such models on the standard IWSLT 2017 multilingual dataset. We achieved an average improvement of 2.23 BLEU points across 12 language pairs compared to the zero-shot performance of a state-of-the-art multilingual system. Additionally, we carry out further experiments in which the effect is confirmed even for language pairs with multiple intermediate pivots.Comment: 10 pages version accepted in WMT 201