The productivity and efficiency of the financial sector is pivotal to the attainment of economic growth and development in developed and developing economies alike, and is of particular interest in the wake of financial sector reform and restructuring. This study applies the Malmquist...

This paper analyses the causes and implications of declining economics major in Australia. Based on a brief review of the relevant literature and an analysis of the Australian time series data, it is found that economics continues to be less attractive to students in relative terms. Three major...

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between the size of government and the process of economic growth in Fiji. The results reported here present a mixed picture, in that the model estimated specifies two different effects of the government sector on economic growth. Using annual...

This paper examines the impact of natural disasters on the Australian equity market. The data set employed consists of daily price and accumulation returns over the period 31 December 1982 to 1 January 2002 for the All Ordinaries Index (AOI) and a record of forty-two severe storms, floods,...

This study employs various bootstrapped Malmquist indices and efficiency scores to investigate the effects of government regulation on the performance of the Iranian banking industry over the period 2003-2008. An alternative decomposition of the Malmquist index, introduced by Simar and Wilson...

The objective of this paper is to determine the adverse impact of the collapse of Ansett on employment using the latest Australian input-output table. The indirect contribution of the collapse of Ansett to the creation of unemployment in various industries is quantified by adopting the...

The critical review undertaken in this paper pinpoints some of the major deficiencies and the strength of the earlier macroeconometric models (MEMs) constructed for Iran as a major oil exporting country. In constructing a new MEM, the flaws of past MEMs should be rectified and their strengths...

This paper examines the major causes of Iran’s unemployment conundrum using a simultaneous-equation model and annual time series data from 1968 to 2000. It is found that the rate of unemployment responds positively to output gap and increasing economic uncertainty and negatively to the higher...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between stock market returns of 13 countries based upon monthly data spanning December 1987 to April 2007. Specifically, the principal component (PC) and maximum likelihood (ML) methods are used to examine any discernable patterns of...

This paper examines the long-run and short-run determinants of unleaded petrol price in Australia’s capital cities using monthly data to find out whether prices respond asymmetrically to external shocks. Based on the cointegration test results and the estimated asymmetric short-run dynamic...