International Journal of Business and Development Studies
Volume:2 Issue: 1, Autumn 2010

Recent strong growth of China’s exports has elevated the country to a rising global economic power and caused geo-political concern to policy-makers in the country and its trading partners world-wide. What are the determinants of this growth, how has it affected major economies in ASEAN (World Bank, 2009) in particular, and what kind of evidence-based responses are required and appropriate? The paper focuses on the first issue and introduces an endogenous trade model (ETM) and, using historical data, empirically investigates the causes of China’s exports in recent years for regional trade policy analysis. The ETM (see Tran Van Hoa, 2004, 2008a for earlier applications) is a system approach and contains improved structural and modelling features, in comparison to conventional gravity theory, panel regression and CGE/GTAP, to provide more credible outcomes and policy options in the sense of Friedman (1953) and Kydland (2006). Significantly, the ETM also incorporates multiple structural changes in the form of crises and policy reforms to accommodate and manage recent economic and financial developments in regional and global economies. Policy options and choice recommendations are, finally, suggested for debate and analysis.

The Asia-Pacific region generates over half of global economic activity (54.2%) and about 43.7% of global trade, and is the most dynamic region in the global economy. At the core of this is an increasingly dynamic, vibrant and entrepreneurial small-medium sized enterprise sector. Advances in information and communications technology, market liberalisation and moves towards closer regional economic integration (e.g. ASEAN, and prospective ASEAN+1, ASEAN+3, ASEAN+5 and ASEAN+6 arrangements) provide new opportunities, as well as new challenges, for regional small business entrepreneurs. In conjunction with these developments has come the increased recognition by regional governments, particularly in the wake of the 1997-98 financial and economic crisis, of the need for expanded entrepreneurial activity in the context of small businesses for the generation of regional income, employment, exports, investment, economic growth, poverty alleviation and regional development. This would also facilitate comprehensive restructuring of corporate sectors, with the aim of improving transparency, improving corporate governance, developing globally competitive enterprises, and further developing the region’s burgeoning and economically significant production networks. This paper reviews the contribution of small-medium sized business entrepreneurs in the Asia-Pacific region, the challenges and opportunities they face in the context of globalisation and regional developments, key capacity building areas, government support measures and potential competitiveness strategies for their survival and development.

Trade relationships built through production chains appear to be lasting due to relation-specific nature of the transactions, compared with the usual transactions of goods sold on the open market. This paper aims to verify such stability of international production networks at the global level, with special emphasis on intra-East Asian trade. A series of survival analyses provide an evidence suggesting that the stability of international production networks is a particularly prominent feature of East Asia. In addition, East Asian countries are more likely to engage in long-lasting trade relationships of intermediate goods with each other than with outsiders as well as compared to outside the region, unlike in the case of finished products.

We apply the two-sector production function developed by Ram (1986) to estimate the threshold regression model for Iran, concerning the effect of government size on economic growth. Three government size indicators are used to find out the different threshold points. The results show a non-linear relationship of the Armey curve in Iran, in which the threshold effects corresponding to total government expenditure share in GDP, government consumption expenditure share in GDP, and government investment expenditure share in GDP of about 34.7%, 23.6% and 8%, respectively.

This paper provides a critical perspective on entrepreneurial characteristics and gives an input to the discussion on the influence of entrepreneurial leadership, communication skills, determination and motivation on sales and customer satisfaction. It also presents the findings from an empirical study examining the structural effect of these four entrepreneurial characteristics on performance. Few have attempted to investigate the link between entrepreneurial characteristics and performance. It is said that entrepreneurial characteristics have positive associations with the firm’s performance. However, the link between entrepreneurial leadership, communication skills, determination and motivation on sales and customer satisfaction in the Malaysian context has not been fully addressed in empirical studies. To address this issue, this paper investigates the influence of these entrepreneurial characteristics on those performances using Pearson’s correlation, cluster analyses and structural equation modeling (SEM). The result of the study reveals that entrepreneurial leadership, communication skills, determination and motivation exhibit high and significant structural effects on sales and customer satisfaction. Findings of the study provide a striking demonstration regarding positive influences of certain entrepreneurial characteristics on performances.

This paper investigates the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty for the period of 1990-2009 by using monthly data in the Iranian economy. The results of a two-step procedure such as Granger causality test which uses generated variables from the first stage as regressors in the second stage, suggests a positive relation between the mean and the variance of inflation. However, Pagan (1984) criticizes this two-step procedure for its misspecifications due to the use of generated variables from the first stage as regressors in the second stage. This paper uses the Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) method to address this issue. The estimates we gathered with the new set of specifications suggest that inflation causes inflation uncertainty, supporting the Friedman–Ball hypothesis.