Millennial Asia

This study examines the existence, tendency and determinants of herding in the Malaysian stock market under market stress from 2016 to 2020. This study adopts ordinary least square and quantile regression models to estimate herding. Three types of measurements are used to capture volatility, which are realized volatility, Parkinson volatility and Garman and Klass volatility. The result shows that herding exists in the Malaysian stock market. Investors are observed to herd stronger in the bearish (down) market condition compared to bullish (up) market condition, especially in the upper quantile (τ > 50%). Realized volatility is found to be significant in every quantile except for the median quantile (τ = 50%) and Garman and Klass’s volatility is significant in the upper quantiles of 0.75 and 0.90. This study assists analysts and investors to formulate better investment strategies. Regulators and policymakers shall also control and regulate the herding behaviour of investors, which can deviate the stocks from their fundamentals. The existence of herding also violates the assumptions of EMH in assuming that investors are rational.

The planning system in local government follows a formal process mandated by legislation and a corpus of regulations. While these strongly advocate citizen participation in selecting, implementing and managing development projects at the local level, in practice, the mechanism is hamstrung by an inadequate social inclusion perspective. The elites continue to play a significant role in the process that marginalizes women, Dalits or minorities in decision-making, resource mobilization or project prioritization. This has demeaned community ownership of development plans and affected the delivery of public services. Because of their perceived lack of capacity, the marginalized communities are denied leadership roles in local government committees and in mobilizing resources or prioritizing their demands. However, with federalism and a robust legal framework in place, the seven-step planning mechanism has, to some extent, been able to address the problem of social exclusion, marginalization and ineffectiveness in local level planning and budgeting.

This study was conducted to know Indonesia sustainable tourism resilience in the COVID-19 era. The research was done through a qualitative approach then analyzed based on the sentiment analysis and tourism resilience theory. The data used on this study are review data related to five super-priority tourism destinations in Indonesia, which are Borobudur Temple, Lake Toba, Labuan Bajo, Mandalika and Likupang since January 2020 to March 2021 from TripAdvisor. The result of this study shows that Indonesia sustainable tourism resilience during the pandemic COVID-19 era does not have strong enough resilience in facing the unstable recessions conditions and following new tourism trends that have emerged in the pandemic era or after the pandemic ends. This study provides two recommendations to overcome those problems: (a) Indonesia needs to develop local tourism activities based on the e-tourism concept and (b) the tourism activity must integrate with digitalization and local wisdom to create local common branding in the destination.

Regional organizations (ROs), a key component of the global order, have become a significant tool for achieving foreign policy objectives of the member countries. Amidst the prevailing politico-strategic environment, a speckled range of national interests of the regional states and non-regional states has motivated or compelled the states to create, collaborate and participate in the functioning of ROs. India is associated with those ROs that possess objectives convenient in pursuit of its national interests and also identical to its foreign policy targets. In this context, this article argues that India’s policy towards ROs is shaped by the Cold War and post-Cold War developments along with the emerging strategic and security environment in the twenty-first century. These developments have created a divergence or convergence of India’s preferences and beliefs with other countries and have determined its participation in the ROs. It is participating actively in the functioning of ROs in pursuit of its national interests in diverse arenas. The ROs, especially South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and even European Union (EU) and Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) are the key instruments for India to achieve the objectives of respective Neighbourhood First Policy (NFP), Look East Policy (LEP), Act East Policy (AEP), Look North Policy (LNP), Connect Central Asia Policy (CCAP) and Indo-Pacific Vision (IPV) frameworks of its foreign policy towards South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Indo-Pacific and the globe. Apart from economic, strategic and security cooperation in the regional context, the ROs can help India in bolstering its image and status as a key power in global affairs.

Small and marginal farmers contribute significantly to agricultural production and livelihoods all over the world. The small size of operational holdings, however, makes them highly susceptible to market risks leading to low levels of farm income. The farmer producer organizations (FPOs) are considered as effective mechanisms as they give voice to the small farmers, help overcome the challenges, by reducing the transaction costs and improving market access. However, in India, farmer collectives suffer from several institutional and structural impediments that affects their performance and thereby not resulting in empowerment and wellbeing of the farmers. In this regard, this article discusses the role of FPOs based on an empirical case study of Sahyadri Farmers Producer Company Ltd (SFPCL) from Maharashtra. The case study analyses the specificities of a private initiative such as Sahyadri, which focuses on making farming viable for farmers with small holdings in particular. The Sahyadri model contributes building the social capital of the farmers and improving the farm income and sustainable livelihoods. The article uses logistic regression to determine the factors influencing collective action and the Cobb–Douglas (CD) Production function to highlight the economic benefits realized by the farmers from being members of the Farmers Producer Company in case of Sahyadri in Maharashtra.

Technological accumulation is a complex process of correct mix of indigenous and/or imported technology, mainly for the firms belonging to developing economies after opening their economies. To understand these issues, the case of Indian capital goods industry is taken for the years 1994–1995 to 2015–2016. It was found that only 39% of the firms belonging to Indian capital goods sector are technologically active, that is, resorting to either embodied or disembodied technology acquisition. Multinomial logit model is estimated to find the impact of various variables in determining the strategy of technology accumulation. The factors such as age, size, technology spillovers and outward foreign direct investment were found to have a positive impact on the firms to resort to ‘indigenous R&D only’ as a strategy of technology accumulation. While ‘disembodied technology import only’ is influenced by factors like embodied and disembodied technology imports. However, strategy ‘both indigenous R&D and disembodied technology import’ is found to be influenced by foreign equity participation, mergers and acquisitions.

Globalization and the development of modern technologies have led to the emergence of service trade. The success of Indian information technology (IT) has changed perception of globe about India and has captured the attention of the globe as it seems a paradox that a developing economy is emerging as a global hub for software exports. In the past three decades, the contribution of the Indian IT industry to national income, employment generation and offsetting the current account deficit is remarkable. In this consideration, the present study is an attempt to analyse the technical efficiency of the IT industry of India during the period 2000–2016 by applying panel data stochastic frontier analysis approach. The study reveals that foreign capital, age and profit ratio have a significant impact on mitigating the technical inefficiency of the IT industry while the research and development (R&D) expenditure has turned out statistically insignificant in determining efficiency. Indian IT industry is mostly driven by service exports which are not survivable in the long run. The study suggests that the Indian IT industry has to transform itself from low value-added to high value-added, from service-driven to product-driven.

Swaran Singh and Reena Marwah (eds.), 2023. Multilateralism in Indo-Pacific: Conceptual and Operational Challenges. Routledge, 203 pp., $42. ISBN 978103244693.