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This paper aims to investigate Malaysia’s house prices behaviour by decomposing trend, cycle and stochastic component.

The authors perform an unobserved component model of a structural time series and Markov switching model that covers the period 1999Q1 to 2015Q4.

The results reveal that the variation in house price in Malaysia is best explained by its trend level, with a small role played by the cycle component; this implies the potential for gaining returns on investments in property by investors and households. The results also show that Malaysia’s HPI cycle is between 8 and 17 years which, in relative terms, is twice the length of the growth cycle and the business cycle in the economy. Meanwhile, the overall movement of HPI is forecast to have a marginal price increase up to 2028Q2.

As house prices remained elevated during the year, the house price dynamic is pivotal for understanding the source of changes in house price. With major findings centred on the relationship between house prices and macroeconomic as well as policy variables, little attention has been paid to composing the trend, cycle and seasonal pattern from the house price index, thus understanding the behaviour of house prices’ unobserved components.

This paper aims to examine the relationships among environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices, innovation and economic growth in five Asian countries from 1990 to 2020.

The study innovatively constructed the ESG index at the country level by using frequency statistics on text mining and factor analysis for each country over time. In addition, this study used the autoregressive distributed lag method to establish a long-term relationship.

The authors discovered that ESG practices among corporate entities significantly impact economic growth in Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Specifically, the environmental component positively affects the growth of Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, while the governance components of ESG contribute to Thailand’s economic growth. The authors also discovered that innovation improves countries’ economic growth, thus offering policy insights into promoting ESG practices and stimulating the ecosystem for innovation.

The paper fills the gap left in previous inconclusive findings on the association between ESG practices and country growth.