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Even if digital financial services have a positive impact on financial inclusion, it creates a digital as well as gender divide within and across countries, creating regional disparity even within developing nations. Though pandemic has initiated digitalization of various services, there has been scanty research on whether digital transfer of income can improve digital financial inclusion in post-pandemic era, especially in developing countries. The purpose of the current study is to explain the regional disparity within developing countries from three regions East Asia Pacific, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, using latest World Findex data, 2021.

The author takes an instrumental variable approach to run bivariate probit model to find the factors that motivate the users to make digital payments.

The study observes that electronic transfer of wages, government transfers and remittances can motivate individuals to make use of digital mode of transactions and mobile. The practice of formal saving and borrowings are the prerequisites. However, this mechanism holds good for East Asia Pacific and not for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, which are poor in information and communication technology infrastructure. Women are lagging behind men, but digital transfer of wages motivate them to make digital transaction.

Digitalization of all government services and provision of affordable mobile network and internet services are necessary for regions like South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. In East Asia Pacific region, data protection, data governance and better regulatory framework are required. Higher female labor force participation with digital transfer of wages and empowerment with smartphones are key to reducing the Gender gap.

The current study corrects for the possible endogeneity issue, which the extant literature has not paid attention to, and provides region-specific and gender-specific policy recommendations for an improved digital inclusion.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that casting actors with similar facial features in a movie can pose challenges in foreign markets, hindering the audience's ability to recognize and remember characters. Extending developments in the literature on the cross-race effect, we hypothesize that facial similarity – the extent to which the actors starring in a movie share similar facial features – will reduce the country-level box-office performance of US movies in East and South-East Asia (ESEA) countries.

We assembled data from various secondary data sources on US non-animation movies (2012–2021) and their releases in ESEA countries. Combining the data resulted in a cross-section of 2,616 movie-country observations.

Actors' facial similarity in a US movie's cast reduces its box-office performance in ESEA countries. This effect is weakened as immigration in the country, internet penetration in the country and star power increase and strengthened as cast size increases.

This first study on the effects of cast's facial similarity on box-office performance represents a novel extension to the growing literature on the antecedents of movies' box-office performance by being at the intersection of the two literature streams on (1) the box-office effects of cast characteristics and (2) the antecedents, in general, of box-office performance in the ESEA region.

The data for this case were obtained primarily through a series of in-person interviews in Penang between the authors and Pete Browning (a pseudonym) from 2017 to early 2019. The authors also consulted secondary data sources, including publicly available material on BMax and “Company B”.

This case examines a key decision, or set of decisions, in the life of a small- to medium-sized management consultancy group, namely, whether they might expand their operations in Southeast Asia, and if so, where. These key decisions came in the wake of their having already established a very modest scale presence there, with an operating base on the island of Penang just off the north western coast of Peninsular Malaysia. The initial establishment of a Southeast Asian branch had been somewhat spontaneous in nature – a former colleague of one of the two managing partners in the USA was on the ground in Malaysia and available: he became the local partner in the firm. But the firm had now been eyeing expansion within the region, with three markets under particular consideration (Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand) and a further two (Vietnam and China) also seen as possible targets, though at a more peripheral level. The questions facing the decision makers were “was it time they expand beyond Malaysia?” and “if so, where?”

This case could be used effectively in undergraduate courses in international business. The key concepts on which the case focuses are the factors affecting market entry, particularly the choice of market and the assessment of potential attractiveness such markets offer.