Margin: The Journal of Applied Economic Research

This study explores the changing direction and degree of financial integration of the emerging economies, People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India, with ASEAN-5 and compares it to the developed economies, the US and Japan, in a time-varying framework. The concordance and rolling concordance indices are used to study the cyclical behaviour in the ASEAN-5 stock markets with the economic activity of the emerging and developed economies. This study covers the period between January 1991 and June 2010. One of the more significant findings from this study is that ASEAN-5 stock markets do not react as a whole to external shock from these four trading partners. Each stock market in ASEAN-5 responded differently in terms of direction and degree towards the influences of the economic condition in these emerging and developed economies. The ASEAN-5 stock markets were less correlated with economic activities in emerging economies but were more aligned with economic activities in developed economies. In summary, ASEAN-5 stock market cycles were still more dependent on the developed economies’ growth rate cycles.

The East Asian crisis highlights the importance of liquidity for smooth functioning of the banking system. It also shows the vulnerabilities that arise as a result of high dependence on international liquidity. This article empirically analyses the influx of liquidity before the crisis and illiquidity during the crisis in finding out whether banks in East Asia held ‘too little’ or ‘too much’ liquidity before and during a crisis and how their vulnerabilities to failure changed as a result of that. Instrumental Variable estimation is used to dissociate the effect of international illiquidity on banks’ liquidity risk during a crisis year. The study finds that the effect of liquidity on the probability of bank failure varies before and during a crisis. The findings also highlight the vulnerabilities of banks to failure as a result of international illiquidity and high reliance on external funding. These findings bring forward the case for stronger regulation of banks’ liquidity, which can be brought forward by better liquidity management.

This article examines the return, volatility, upside risk and downside risk spillover effects from crude oil prices and the US$/INR exchange rate to the major Indian industrial sectors using Hong’s (2001) approach. We make use of the generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) class of models based on the generalised error distribution (GED) to estimate extreme upside and downside Value-at-Risk (VaR). Our empirical results provide evidence of a significant return spillover effect from the crude oil market to the energy, FMCG and pharmaceutical (pharma) sectors and from the US$/INR exchange rate to the pharma sector. We also find evidence of significant volatility spillover from crude oil prices to the energy, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and multinational corporation (MNC) sectors and from the US$/INR exchange rate to the energy and pharma sectors. Moreover, we find significant upside risk spillover from crude oil prices and the US$/INR exchange rate to all the industrial sectors (except for the energy sector with respect to the US$/INR exchange rate); significant downside risk spillover from crude oil prices to the energy, FMCG, pharma and MNC sectors and from the US$/INR exchange rate to only the pharma sector. In addition, we observe two-way downside risk spillover between crude oil prices and the US$/INR exchange rate.

This article examines various home country determinants of outward FDI from developing economies, which have received limited attention in empirical studies. The role of home country determinants is investigated for a large sample of developing economies, as against a handful of developing economies, for the most recent period, 1996–2010, using a panel data econometric framework. The results indicate that source country’s level of economic development, globalisation, political risk and science and technology investments contribute significantly to outward FDI from developing countries. While outward FDI might be unavoidable in the course of economic development and globalisation, developing countries need to emphasise improving political governance in order to prevent capital outflow arising out of high domestic political risk. On the flip side, science and technology investments could contribute to higher outward FDI, thereby yielding complementary benefits of internationalisation in the long-run. Thus, given the evolving role of developing countries in the global economic scenario, a balance between domestic and international investments is crucial for them to harness the benefits of globalisation, which can be achieved through suitable governance and policy reforms in specific fields.

After decades of intergovernmental transfers in India, studies to analyse the impacts of central government transfers on regional growth are inadequate. Even the limited studies that have been done have excluded the northeastern region (NER) from their analysis, except for the state of Assam. This article examines the impact of central government grants on economic growth in northeast India. In addition, we analyse if the growth impact of grants, if any, is uniform across states. Our analysis, based on official secondary data from eight northeastern states for the period 1991 to 2010, shows that per capita real central grant is positively associated with economic growth, but conditional on other variables being held constant. However, the effects of such grants are not uniform across the states. The growth effect of grants is estimated to be highest in Assam and lowest in Mizoram.