Life Insurance Demand in Malaysia

Malaysia has been identified as having the second highest saving in the world; however, less than 30 percent of Malaysia's total population of about 6.4 million is insured in 1999. The fact that a large section of the society remains uninsured means that any sudden loss of property or any personal misfortune will suffered a reduction in living standard and poverty. Besides that, savings generated by life insurance companies are crucial in providing long term savings for sustainable economic development and growth of the nation. Nevertheless, the life insurance industry in Malaysia has not been thoroughly investigated Therefore, the objectives of this study are to identify the factors contributing individual purchasing behaviour of life insurance in Malaysia, and to investigate the macroeconomic factors influence on the aggregate demand of life insurance in Malaysia. Since the demand analysis is an important component of an attempt to understand the forces driving industry growth - its past and future prospects. The empirical findings of individual purchasing behaviour of life insurance indicated significant demographic variables including the presence of children in the household, the age of the consumer, and their income level. While, the empirical finding of the multivariate Granger-causality test suggests that national income can be a stimulus to the life insurance demand in the short-run. The results of Granger-causality test also indicate that there is bidirectional causality between the price of life insurance and life insurance demand in Malaysia. Furthermore, the empirical results also showed that the interest rate significantly influence the life insurance demand in Malaysia. However, the causality tests of this study did not detect a significant short-run direct causal relationship between inflation rates and life insurance demand in Malaysia. Last but not least, the finding of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach indicated the demand for life insurance in Malaysia is closely linked to the efficiency scores of insurance companies. Over the empirical years, most of the local constituted insurance companies operate in inefficiency state compared to the foreign Insurance companies

Price and volatility behaviour of four Asian stock markets

The past ten years have witnessed many changes in the Asian economies and stock markets, particularly in the Four Tigers, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. They enjoyed economic growth well above the world average during the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were sharp increases in their stock market capitalisations against the background of low growth and low interest rates in the US and European countries in the early 1990s. This coincided with the time when measures to liberalise these markets were implemented to allow or attract foreign direct investments in their stock markets. Then by mid 1997, both their economies and stock markets began to slump. This ten year time period thus provides a good opportunity to examine how such economic and institutional changes affected the price and volatility behaviour of the Four Tigers and their relationships with other markets. Overall, the findings of the thesis suggest that with the increase in foreign participation in the four individual markets, the influence of noise trading activities has been reduced through more and better informed trading. However, their relationships with three world major markets, the US, the UK and Japan, are not getting much stronger. There is no evidence to suggest that their prices are being increasingly led by the world markets, nor is their volatility becoming more sensitive to foreign news. Their price and volatility relationships with three regional markets, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, were not particularly strong either, until recently, when the Asian financial crisis has made them more responsive to shocks from one another. The message to the governments of the Four Tigers is clear. Foreign direct equity investments have not destabilised their stock markets. Instead, the mismanagement of their own and/or their trading partners' economies should be held more responsible

Efficiency, Technological Shift And Human Capital In The K-Economies Of Asean Five Plus Three

Develop towards a knowledge-based economy is extremely important for the ASEAN five plus three countries, since the countries face challenges at the global fronts and technological changes; the rules of competition have changed. A country’s competitive advantage is no longer dependent solely on factors such as labor, land and natural resources, but on its potential to produce, acquire, utilize and disseminate knowledge. Thus, this is essentially a shift from economic development based on resources to development based on knowledge where human capital (consequently education) emerges as crucial public policy themes for creating wealth and increasing the quality of life. This thesis attempts to determine the level of knowledge-based development in Malaysia in terms of efficiency, technical change and human capital. This development is then compared with the other ASEAN five plus three countries,which includes four members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) namely Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand and the three Northeast Asian states, namely China, Japan and South Korea. In particular, the objectives of this study are to (1) determine the contribution of knowledge-based human capital to economic growth in the ASEAN five plus three countries, (2) identify the determinants of knowledge-based human capital in Malaysia and the selected ASEAN five plus three countries, (3) determine the efficiency of Malaysian in generating the knowledge-based outputs, as compared to other ASEAN five plus three countries, and (4) investigate whether there is any long-run convergence in the development of knowledge-based human capital among Malaysia and the ASEAN five plus three countries. The empirical findings of the economic growth model using a panel cointegration framework and Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) show that the human capital significantly influenced the economic growth in the ASEAN five plus three countries. Furthermore, the empirical results of the human capital analyses also indicate significant economic and demographic variables including the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and fertility rate. However, the time series cointegration test did not detect a significant long-run convergence in the development of human capital among Malaysia and the ASEAN five plus three countries.The empirical findings of the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) indicate that Malaysia, Korea, Singapore, Japan and China appear to be the most efficient countries in generating the knowledge-based outputs, followed by Thailand though Indonesia and Philippines appear to be the least efficient countries. In regard to the issue of catch-up and convergence, the results show that Malaysia and Korea are catching up with the developed country such as Japan while other ASEAN five plus three countries are failed to catch-up with developed countries over the period. Last but not least, all the ASEAN five plus three countries have enjoyed from technical progress and achieved positive total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates over the 1992-2005 period

The Politics of Pity versus Piety: The Poetics and Politics Behind Different Feminist Accounts on the Muslim Woman

This article analyzes two books that utilize the construct of “The Muslim Woman” as a symbol for public consumption across a global and conceptual scale: Saba Mahmood’s book, \u27Politics of Piety\u27, and Malala Yousafzai’s and Christina Lamb’s \u27I am Malala\u27. The motivation behind the analysis is to situate the texts within debates on essentialism within accounts of Muslim women. While essentialism and the critique of it in such discussions are not a novelty, the books demonstrate a physical manifestation of essentialism and a reductionist reaction toward this brand of essentialism. Through analysis of the content, poetics, and response toward the books, I argue that scholarship surround Muslim women are still mired in essentialism albeit efforts to avoid it due to a lack in direction as to how to resolve the issue. I suggest using a combination of power convolution and intersectionality of identities to capture the representation of Muslim women

New Variance Ratio Tests to Identify Random Walk from the General Mean Reversion Model

We develop some properties on the autocorrelation of the k-period returns for the general mean reversion (GMR) process in which the stationary component is not restricted to the AR(l) process but take the form of a general ARMA process. We then derive some properties of the GMR process and three new non-parametric tests comparing the relative variability of returns over different horizons to validate the GMR process as an alternative to random walk. We further examine the asymptotic properties of these tests which can then be applied to identify random walk models from the GMR processes.mean reversion, variance ratio test, random walk, stock price, stock return

The motives of Hong Kong-Japanese international joint ventures

This paper attempts to study Hong Kong-Japanese joint ventures from the perspectives of firm-specific advantages provided by both partners. The analysis focuses on the local partner\u27s perspective of establishing international joint ventures (IJVs) with a Japanese multinational retailer. First, the background of the local partner, especially the company’s organizational restructuring immediately before the formation of the IJVs is examined. Second, the development and consolidation of the IJVs between the two partners by a series of IJV activities in Hong Kong, Asia, and China is described. Third, the motives behind both partners to establish the IJVs are examined. Finally, an evaluation of the IJVs of whether the IJVs have fulfilled the local partner’s motives is conducted. It is found that the IJVs have provided an opportunity for the local partner to overcome the increasing Japanese competition in the Hong Kong retail sector since the mid-1980s. Nevertheless, the local partner needs to overcome many management problems resu1ted from the IJVs partnership which may have hindered the local partner to achieve its objectives in the IJVs

A study of employment system of Japanese multinational retailers in Hong Kong

This study examines the employment system of Japanese multinational retailing corporations in Hong Kong through two case companies - Morioka and Okadaya. The human resource management (HRM) practices – recruitment and selection, remuneration, and training and development - of the companies are studied. The different HRM practices applied to different groups of employees within each case company are compared using an employment systems model. The employment system is structured and mu1ti-layered. The development of the structured employment system is then analysed in relation to the cultural and sectoral factors. It is shown that the cultural characteristics of the Japanese parent companies can only explain the ethnocentric management approach used in which Japanese personnel are employed in the internal labour marker (ILM) and local employees are employed outside the ILM. Economic and labour market conditions in both parent and host countries and sectoral characteristics have also contributed to the stratification of the employment system among the local employees. The implications of this study are that the long-term development of Japanese multinational retailers will be weakened if the structured employment system persist