Sajid Ali, Zulkornain Yusop, Shivee Ranjanee Kaliappan, Lee Chin and Muhammad Saeed Meo
This study examines the impact of trade openness, human capital, public expenditure and institutional performance on unemployment in various income groups of Organization of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines the impact of trade openness, human capital, public expenditure and institutional performance on unemployment in various income groups of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries.
Design/methodology/approach
Traditional panel data methodologies neglect the issue of cross-sectional dependence and provide ambiguous outcomes. A novel approach, “dynamic common correlated effects (DCCE)”, is utilized in this study to tackle with aforementioned issue. Pooled mean group (PMG) estimation is also applied to verify the robustness of the findings.
Findings
The long-run estimates show that trade openness has a significant and negative relationship with the unemployment rate in overall and lower-income OIC economies and a positive correlation with unemployment in higher-income OIC countries. Public expenditure is negatively and significantly correlated with unemployment in higher-income and overall OIC economies. Moreover, human capital reduces unemployment in higher-income and overall OIC countries while increases unemployment in lower-income OIC economies.
Practical implications
The research tends to endorse the argument for continuous trade openness policy along with efficient use of public expenditure and improved institutional performance to reduce unemployment in OIC countries.
Originality/value
The DCCE approach in this research considers heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence between cross-sectional units and thus gives robust outcomes.
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Idowu Opeoluwa Isreal Akingba, Shivee Ranjanee Kaliappan and Hanny Zurina Hamzah
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the long-term impacts of health capital on economic growth in Singapore from 1980 to 2013.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the long-term impacts of health capital on economic growth in Singapore from 1980 to 2013.
Design/methodology/approach
Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL)-ECM methodology and several diagnostic and specification tests were used to estimate the impact of health capital on economic growth on time series data covering the period 1980-2013.
Findings
The results confirm that health capital (measure by health expenditure per capita) positively and significantly affects Singapore’s economic growth in the long run. In addition, the equilibrium error correction coefficient lagged by one in the short-run is approximately 83.25 percent for all estimated variables, implying a considerably high speed of long-term adjustment to equilibrium following a short-term shock. Moreover, the Toda-Yamamoto’s Granger causality estimation reveals that there is a unidirectional causality from health expenditure per capita to GDP per capita.
Research limitations/implications
The findings imply that Singapore’s economic growth could be improved significantly if expenditure on health capital is increased. This eventually would have a substantial impact on human productivity which leads to improved output per capita. Thus, policy makers and/or the government should strive to create institutional capacity to improve basic health service by strengthening the health institutions infrastructure that produces healthy and quality manpower.
Originality/value
Grounded on the premises that there are little or no studies on the impact of health capital on Singapore economy, this paper provides new evidence on the potential effect of health capital on Singapore’s economic growth over the last three decades. Also, this study explore the causal effect (unidirectional or bidirectional) between health capital and economic growth.
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Masoud Rashid Mohamed, Shivee Ranjanee Kaliappan, Normaz Wana Ismail and W.N.W Azman-Saini
The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of foreign aid on corruption in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Foreign aid is aimed to promote economic growth by…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of foreign aid on corruption in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Foreign aid is aimed to promote economic growth by complementing the recipient country’s shortfall of financial resource. However, if the recipient country’s quality of governance and institutions is poor, the process of growth will be undermined. Since foreign aid to SSA countries has been increasing substantially in recent years, it is imperative to explore its impact on the level of corruption in the SSA countries.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper opted to use a Quantile regression (QR) approach to examine the impact of foreign aid on corruption. The data cover from the year 2000 to 2010 for 42 Sub-Saharan countries. QR is appropriate to achieve the stated objective because the method enables to examine the effect of aid on at different level of corruption.
Findings
The paper provides empirical insights on the impact of foreign aid on corruption level in SSA countries. The finding indicates that foreign aid has reduction effect on the corruption level of SSA countries. The effect is likely to be greater in nations that experience a higher level of corruption. The findings further reveal that aid from different bilateral sources has different effect on corruption. As a whole, the findings are statistically significant and robust to alternative measure of corruption.
Research limitations/implications
Since the study just focus on Sub-Saharan African countries, the research findings may lack generalization to the entire African countries or poor developing countries that are receiving substantial amount of foreign aid. Therefore, future research should incorporate all the African countries or all poor developing countries.
Practical implications
Since the empirical findings reveals that aid reduces the corruption level and aid from different bilateral source have different effect on corruption, it is important to establish more cooperation between donor countries in allocating aid. The conditions attached to aid should be, among other things, be related with improvement of governance and institutional environment. Allocation of aid should be selective such that countries in institutional quality should be among the important criteria for a country to qualify for aid.
Originality/value
This paper fulfills the need to study the relationship between foreign aid and corruption in the case of SSA countries. The aid-corruption nexus is relatively under explored issue especially in the case African countries.
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Shivee Ranjanee Kaliappan, Rokiah Alavi, Kalthom Abdullah and Muhammad Arif Zakaullah
Since the mid‐1990s, there has been a rapid expansion of large‐scale foreign retailers in many countries across Southeast Asia, Central Europe and Latin America. This emerging…
Abstract
Purpose
Since the mid‐1990s, there has been a rapid expansion of large‐scale foreign retailers in many countries across Southeast Asia, Central Europe and Latin America. This emerging trend has triggered a number of research interests on the issue of retail globalization. The research aims to consider the entry of foreign hypermarkets in Malaysia and their impact on the development and growth of domestic suppliers and manufacturers.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses both primary and secondary data. Secondary data were drawn from industry sources which included government departments, economic reports, retailing magazines and companies, web sites. Meanwhile, primary data are collected using mail survey questionnaire and face‐to‐face interviews.
Findings
The findings of this study indicate that foreign hypermarkets play a very important role in the development and growth of the domestic suppliers via backward linkages. The main forms of linkages are product supply, informational linkages, assistance with inventory management, technical support and quality assurance and procurement systems. A majority of the firms indicated that they benefited substantially from the presence of foreign hypermarkets; however, they also face several challenges brought about by imposition of several unfair terms and procurement policy.
Originality/value
The findings are largely derived from the experience encountered by domestic firms who participated in the survey. Thus, it is believed that their views could definitely help all the parties including the policymakers and researchers to better understand the impact of foreign hypermarkets on local businesses and take appropriate policy measures.