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This paper analyses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Myanmar’s tourism industry, identifying challenges and innovations, and predicting future trends to foster a resilient and sustainable sector.

The study uses a comprehensive analysis of tourism trends, government and private sector responses and changes in tourist behaviour, employing data, case studies and policy reviews.

The pandemic significantly disrupted Myanmar’s tourism, causing economic losses and shifts towards sustainable, outdoor and cultural experiences. Effective strategies by the government and private sector are aiding recovery and suggesting a more diverse and resilient future.

The research is limited by the availability of data during the pandemic, highlighting the need for ongoing strategy adaptation.

The study recommends digitalization, health protocols, domestic tourism focus and sustainable practices for a robust post-pandemic industry.

The study emphasizes the pandemic’s social impact on tourism-dependent communities and the need for inclusive, sustainable tourism practices.

Itprovides unique insights into COVID-19’s multifaceted impact on Myanmar’s tourism, offering valuable information for future sector strategies.

This study aims to convey the understanding of the ecosystem – how “hundi” works on the border trade between Myanmar and northern Thailand, which is an informal transfer system and is widely used as an alternative banking system. Even though the role of hundi is unable to declare the sources of money under the standard settlement of formal banking system, a failure to operate of its official mechanism are carrying using hundi, as a financial platform across the border between Thailand and Myanmar. This study surveys the best practice mechanism for the regional and international cooperation.

This paper draws on relevant literature, open-source reporting, and interviews with more than 30 interviewees on the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Interviewees includes border-trader, money changer, money transfer operators, business leaders, hundi operators, immigrant labors, government officials and commercial banking staffs.

This study provides a unique insight of hundi system, which work as the alternative mode of formal banking. It is an informal fund transfer payment platform used on the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the past five decades. It insists that hundi plays a significant role in both substitution and complementary on the trade and payment across the border of Myanmar–Thailand. Even though confronting with the barriers of financing of terrorism (anti money laundering AML/combating the financing of terrorism CFT) risk, the competition with the expanding and modernizing formal banking sector, and the introduction of Fintech and mobile money services. In the short term, these are unlikely to eliminate the hundi system completely, but may instead push hundi operators towards adopting these networks and technologies in their own operations.

This paper will be a useful source for academics, development professionals, policymakers, law enforcement agencies and business actors who are seeking to understand Myanmar’s informal payment system, hundi.

This is the latest work for border trade payment or trade financing role of hundi which has hidden under the informal market of the border for several decades. It has few research of hundi on border trade and payment, particularly after the military coup in 2021 which made hundi return to be on the spotlight and simultaneous mechanism of border trade and payment ecosystem of Myanmar. This paper will be a useful source for academics, development professionals, policymakers, law enforcement agencies and business actors who are eager to understand Myanmar’s informal payment system, hundi, especially during the hardship.

This study scrutinizes the attitudes of postgraduate students specializing in education toward research at one University of Education in Myanmar.

Having collected data from 121 Master in Education (MEd) students in three education departments, the study validated Papanastasiou's (2014) Revised-Attitude toward Research (R-ATR) scale by performing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A one-way MANOVA was used to establish the significance of mean differences between groups and ANOVA was used for the same purpose among groups.

The R-ATR scale is fit with the sample (χ²/df = 1.60), and the students' attitudes toward research are favorable with mean value for research usefulness (5.98), positive research predispositions (5.55) and research anxiety (3.61), despite feeling stressed and anxious. There was a significant difference in the students' attitudes toward research regarding their departments, while no significant difference was found based on their research experience, gender and age.

There should be an effective mechanism in implementing the research course and in online delivery mode, collaboration between the faculties in the process of revision and review of the research courses, effective strategies of improving research instructors' quality and also internationalization to sustain students' positive attitudes toward research and to reduce their stress and anxiety.

This research is empirically novel, and the initiative attempts to first use the R-ATR scale in teacher education in Myanmar.

This study aims to explore the diverse sources of electricity generation (coal, natural gas, oil and hydroelectricity) and their respective associations with economic growth and environmental quality.

This study uses static panel data analysis with a random effects model for six selected ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Filipina, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar) from 1994 to 2014.

This study reveals that economic growth in six selected ASEAN countries is enhanced by electricity generation from all sources, while the contribution of electricity production from hydroelectricity remains the largest and strongest. There is no environmental impact of electricity production from hydroelectric, whereas fossil fuel-based electricity production emits carbon dioxide, with coal sources being the largest contributor, followed by natural gas and oil.

Based on the results, these six ASEAN countries should invest more in hydropower projects, reduce the coal mix in power generation and promote clean coal technology to improve economic efficiency and environmental sustainability.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no research has examined the relationship between electricity production, environmental quality and economic growth in Southeast Asian nations. Therefore, the outcome of this study is expected to provide insightful results to supplement the framing and implementation of national and collective regional strategies for sustainable electricity generation in ASEAN countries.

The direction of the causality relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and economic growth is a highly controversial issue in the literature. There are two basic approaches advocating different causal directions between FDI and growth, which are called hypotheses of FDI-led Growth and Growth-led FDI. The aim of this study is to analyze the causality relationship between FDI and economic growth in RCEP countries and thus make a new contribution to the discussions in the relevant literature. In addition, the results of the study are expected to provide important implications for the policies to be designed for economic growth based on FDI flows to RCEP countries. Thus, by examining the direction of causality between FDI and economic growth in RCEP countries, we aim to provide a new contribution to related literature and make some implications for the policy design process of economic growth in the RCEP area.

We empirically examined the direction of a causal link between FDI and economic growth in the context of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RPEC) countries in order to test the hypothesis of FDI-led growth and Growth-led FDI. Accordingly, as our main variables of interest, we incorporated the inward foreign direct investment stock to gross domestic product ratio (FDI) and gross domestic product per capita (GDP). Hatemi-J (2012) asymmetric causality test has been employed in the investigation of the direction of causality between FDI and GDP over the period of 1980–2020. Thus, unlike most of the studies investigating the direction of causality between FDI and growth using the linear causality analysis method, our study performed a nonlinear causality analysis.

Empirical results reveal that the causal relationship between FDI and national income in RPEC countries is non-linear or asymmetric . The results of the symmetric causality test for both from FDI to national income and from national income to FDI are statistically insignificant for all countries. Therefore, this finding obtained from the study provided an important guide to the econometric methods to be used in other studies to be conducted in the same region in the future. Concerning the asymmetric causality relationship from FDI to growth, positive FDI shocks are an important cause of national income in most RCEP countries. However, the effect of negative FDI shocks on national income is quite weak compared to positive shocks. Regarding the asymmetric causality relationship from growth to FDI, positive national income shocks do not create a significant causal relationship with FDI. Similarly, the effects of negative national income shocks on FDI are statistically insignificant. Overall, asymmetric causality test results reveal that positive FDI shocks have an important causal impact on economic growth in most RCEP countries. Thus, the results of econometric analysis mostly support the argument that the FDI-led growth hypothesis rather than the Growth-led FDI hypothesis in RCEP countries. Accordingly, policy-makers in most of the RCEP countries should continue to provide more incentives and facilities to multinational companies in order to ensure constant economic growth.

Our study brings a significant difference in the econometric method used compared to most of the other studies in the literature. Existing empirical studies on the direction of causality between FDI and growth mostly use standard Granger-linear causality-type tests to detect the direction of causality among FDI and growth. Unlike most of the studies in the literature, our study adopted a different methodological approach, namely the Hatemi J test to detect the non-linear causality between FDI and economic growth in RCEP countries. Therefore, this paper made a new methodological contribution significantly to the literature focusing on the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using a non-linear causality method rather than a linear causality one.