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The purpose of this paper is to examine the firm efficiency or technical efficiency (TE), pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE) in the selected developed and developing Asia-Pacific countries.

The sample consists of a sum of 700 firms in selected developed and developing Asia-Pacific countries over the period from 2009 to 2015. The non-parametric data envelopment analysis under the production approach is used to investigate firm efficiency.

On average, this paper discovers that the firms in selected Asia-Pacific countries are moderately efficient. Scale inefficiency (SIE) is found to be the dominant source of firms’ technical inefficiency. The analysis of return to scale shows that the large firms tend to operate at decreasing return to scale level, while the small firms tend to operate at increasing return to scale level.

The findings from this paper provide significant insights to the policy makers and firm managers in promoting the efficient firms of Asia-Pacific countries.

The present paper conducts a critical analysis on return to scale in the firms sector of Asia-Pacific context, which is ignored by the past studies on firm efficiency since the analysis of return to scale is mostly emphasized on banking sector. The precise nature of SIE is important for a firm to be efficient in achieving the firm’s primary goals of profit maximization and sustaining market competitiveness.

This chapter investigates the impact of the euro crisis on Asia’s short-term economic outlook. This chapter tries to answer this question by examining both the trade and financial channels of crisis transmission. More specifically, it looks at the effect of euro crisis on Asian exports and growth, contagion from EU financial markets to Asian financial markets, and influence of EU bank lending on credit growth in Asia. The chapter also touches upon Asia’s policy space to assess how well the region is positioned to weather another major external shock. This chapter finds that the impact of euro crisis on developing Asia points to a sizable but manageable short-term impact. Furthermore, our analysis points to a significant effect on the region’s financial systems, especially its banking sector. This chapter informs policymakers of the impact of the euro crisis and advice to continue to keep a close eye on eurozone developments and their ramifications for their economies.

Studies showed that policy influences housing provision. The review of these policies in the Southeast Asia's is possibly not yet adequate because of recent gap in housing demand-supply across the region. This review evaluates the state policy in low-cost housing (LCH) provision in Southeast Asian developing countries reported in published studies.

An electronic search (ScienceDirect, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar) was conducted using the following search terms: “Low-Cost Housing policy in Southeast Asia.” Reference list of identified studies was scanned to identify more studies. Studies published between 1991 and 2020 that focused either on the region or country within the region were selected. An independent reviewer extracted data from the studies using a standardised form and 27 studies were included in this review.

LCH developing countries experience, encumbrances and measures to mitigate LCH demand-supply gap in Southeast Asia were the issues addressed from the reviewed. Findings from the studies indicate that the level of lax state policy and enforcement of LCH varies across nations.

Findings and recommendations of this paper were based on systematically reviewed literature but does not compromise the robustness regarding state policy in low-cost housing provision in Southeast Asian developing countries. Thus, exploratory sequential mixed methods approach has been recommended as part of the implications for future research.

As part of the practical implications, this paper highlights the mechanism behind the success of Singapore LCH policy and transferability of the model to the developing countries within and outside the region, and open up the possibility to adopt these policies.

This study is probably the first systematic review on low-cost housing in Southeast Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to review the post-harvest loss experience of several Asia-Pacific economies to analyse the potential impacts of reduction of such losses using a range of remedial measures.

A conceptual framework has been developed and then applied to a case study based on several Asia-Pacific economies to provide an empirical basis for the analysis in the paper.

Limited access to vital farm inputs and credit, poor infrastructure and lack of technical and market information are some of the critical challenges confronting many small farmers in developing economies including those in the selected case-study countries. The estimated “food savings” are considerable if Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s pledge to reduce food losses and waste by 10 per cent by 2020, relative to the 2011-2012 levels is realised in the case-study economies.

Further work is urgently required to collect more up-to-date data on food losses along the food supply chain, including post-harvest losses, in many economies across the world, including the Asia-Pacific region.

The analysis of post-harvest losses is underpinned by a conceptual framework that has been developed and applied to several Asia-Pacific economies.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically assess the impact of remittances on the economic performance of the 16 Asian developing countries, taking account of their institutional qualities.

A panel of 16 Asian developing countries (Central Asia, South Asia, and ASEAN) over the period of 2002–2016 is employed in the analysis. To assess the impact of remittances on economic performance in consideration of institutional quality, OLS estimates as well as GMM are used.

The effect of remittances on economic growth is statistically significant. In addition, they also impact economic growth when they interact with institutional or financial development variables. For the long-run growth process of Central Asian, South Asian, and ASEAN countries, a sound and smooth institutional framework appears to be indispensable. Also, it was found that more fragile economies tend to achieve bigger growth than less fragile economies, as this kind of growth is triggered by more remittances flowing into fragile economies. However, the impact of remittances on growth does not depend on the level of ICT. FDI and financial development have positive impact on growth.

There are limitations to this research as well. Due to the unavailability of data, several countries had to be removed from this study. The cost of sending money might be an important variable for this study. However, the data on this variable from reliable sources are almost impossible to gather. Therefore, this variable is also not included in this research. The savings from remittances when intermediated through formal financial channels will, in fact, produce a positive allocation and distribution of resources that may eventually become an important source of growth. However, one precondition for larger and greater growth is that remittances need to be well and properly utilized by the financial sector. Therefore, quality institutions should be formed first, which can facilitate investment activities and make the flow of remittances more convenient.

This paper exclusively considers the case of Asian developing countries (Central Asia, South Asia, and ASEAN) to assess the impact of remittances on the economic performance of these countries, with special consideration of the interaction effects of remittances and institutional quality in these emerging Asian economies. The previous studies on the effect of remittances on growth do not conform to one concrete conclusion. This study is undertaken in a bid to get the best possible result on the impact of remittances on the growth of the selected countries, majority of which attract substantial chunk of remittances into their economies.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore the interrelationships between FDI with growth and sustainability dimension; and to empirically analyze the four dimensions, namely, environmental, economic, social and governance of sustainable FDI for South Asia and West Asia.

The data utilized in the paper is sourced from the World Development Indicators and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, covering South and West Asian region over the period 2011–2017. The paper employed both static and dynamic panel (two-step difference generalized methods of moments) estimation methods.

The results established a significant and robust relationship of past year FDI inflows with the current year’s value of FDI inflows for both the regions. Further, some variances in the relationships such as control of corruption, long-run carbon emissions, research and development, number of trademark applications as per the contextual factors have been detected.

The conclusions related to gender and governance found in this paper will be of interest to both researchers and policy makers for substantially reorienting the sustainability attributes to the foreign investment.

The authors’ main contributions are: to encapsulate the conceptual framework into an empirical model by combining all the four dimensions, namely, environmental, economic, social and governance; to have analyzed the possible differences and similarities in the study based on South and West Asia; to have explored the relationship between gender and FDI.

The purpose of this paper is to examine patterns and determinants of trade among developing countries (South‐South trade), with emphasis on the role of production sharing in global economic integration of the Southern economies.

The paper begins with an analytical narrative of the emerging trends and patterns of South‐South trade using a classification system that helps delineating trade based on global production sharing (network trade) from total recorded trade. Then it undertakes a comparative econometric analysis of the determinants of South‐South and South‐North trade using the standard gravity model.

The share of South‐South trade in world trade has shown a significant increase over the past two decades. This increase has predominantly come from the dynamic East Asian countries, reflecting their growing engagement in global production sharing. The growth dynamism of East‐Asia centered production networks depends heavily on demand for final (assembled) goods in the Northern markets; South‐South trade is largely complementary to, rather than competing with, South‐North trade. While regional trading agreements (RTAs) could play a role at the margin, natural economic forces associated with growth and structural change in the economy and the overall macroeconomic climate as reflected in the real exchange rate, and the quality of trade related logistics are far more important in the expansion of South‐South network trade.

This is the first study to examine patterns and determinants of South‐South trade paying attention to the role of global production sharing. The findings are valuable for informing the contemporary policy debate on promoting South‐South trade. The trade data classification system developed here is expected to help further research on this subject.

This study investigates the impact of government and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on companies' business operations, especially risk-taking tendencies and corporate financial reporting quality (FRQ).

The study employs the generalised least squares regression model. The final sample comprised 27,376 company-year observations from eight countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

EPU has a negative and significant effect on investment activity and FRQ. Higher EPU leads to a decline in investment and FRQ.

There are several limitations in this study. First, the authors used abnormal investments to measure investments, without considering the degree of irreversibility investment objectives. Second, although control variables are included at the company and country levels, they may only partially control for companies' mitigation effects. Third, the sample is limited to developing countries with unique characteristics in Asia-Pacific; therefore, the findings cannot be generalised.

The findings can help investors, analysts and regulators evaluate EPU's impact on companies' business activities by offering an overview regarding the decline in investment efficiency and FRQ. The results can also be used as input for regulators in formulating policies that encourage companies to regulate investment levels without harming other stakeholders and maintain FRQ during periods of uncertainty.

This research provides intriguing insights into EPU's effects on companies' investment activity and FRQ in developing countries, which are sensitive to changes in macroeconomic conditions.

This paper aims to analyse, the issue concerning the quality of inward foreign direct investments (FDI) by empirically investigating the role of four sustainability determinants of FDI, namely, economic, environmental, social and governance using data from 22 developing countries of the Asian region over a period from 2000–2016.

The methodology adopted to achieve this purpose is dynamic panel estimation (two-step difference generalised method of moments) by developing three econometric models. The data is sourced from the World Development, Worldwide Governance Indicators, International Telecommunication Union and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

The econometric results indicate that, in general, control of corruption, political stability and electricity consumption influence sustainable FDI favourably; and CO₂ emissions lower the extent of sustainable FDI. The result underlines deficiencies in the information technology aspect, which has a non-significant yet positive relationship with sustainable FDI. A pertinent finding of this study is that the past value of FDI inflows increases the current year’s FDI inflows in developing countries.

The findings related to gender and information technology aspects found in this paper will be of interest to both researchers and policymakers for substantially reorienting the sustainability attributes to foreign investment.

The authors’ main contributions are to encapsulate the conceptual framework into an empirical model by combining all the four dimensions, namely, environmental, economic, social and governance for developing countries.

During the last few decades, there have been significant divergences in the flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) as per decisions taken by multinational companies (MNCs), and many of the developing nations in the Asia and Pacific region are most remarkable in this regard (UNCTAD, 2015). Apart from various economic factors, some sociopolitical issues have also been identified as influencing the FDI decisions. This study investigates the comovements of the standard measures of terrorist activities and MNCs’ decision on FDI in selected developing countries in the Asia and Pacific region by employing Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) estimation technique on constructing a balanced panel for 1990–2016. Results summarize that FDI inflows are negatively influenced by terrorist activities in the developing economies of the Asia and Pacific region.