International Economics

This study examines the utilisation of the Internet for disseminating corporate information among 100 top companies listed on Bursa Malaysia in the year 2007. These companies were chosen based on market capitalisation and relied on website observation and content analysis. An Internet disclosure index of 61 content items was categorised into four major groups: accounting and financial information, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), contact details of investor relations and related conveniences. In addition, 26 presentation format items categorised into two major groups: technological features and convenience and usability of website navigation support were used as benchmark. The results indicate that the highest disclosure by the companies accrued for accounting and financial information attributes. The lowest disclosures by companies accrued for technology features attributes. The results show that more than 59% of the Malaysian public listed companies published reasonably well-developed Internet-based reporting and achieved a quality score for Internet Corporate Reporting (ICR). On average, the frequency of the identified items disclosed by the companies for the content of the website was higher than for the presentation of information. Among the six categories identified, technological features theme was considered as a critical part that needs attention from the Malaysian companies. The results also show that most companies provided their full annual reports using Portable Document Format (PDF). However, none of the companies adopt Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) format. Therefore, Malaysian companies are urged to seize more opportunities provided by the Internet technology in preparing their ICR.

Does the national economy lead the stock market or vice versa? Using co integration test and Granger casualty test, this paper analyzes the relationship between the stock index and the national economy between developed countries and developed financial markets in the world, these countries included USA, Australia, England, Canada and Japan. On the other hand we selected Iran, Malaysia, Turkey, Philippine and Indonesia as developing countries and examined same relationship. The gross domestic product (GDP) is one the primary indicators used to gauge the health of a country's economy. It represents the total dollar value of all goods and services produced over a specific time period, in this paper we used of GDP for national economy performance and stock index as the indicator of financial markets performance.

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between the prices of gold and stock price indices for Armenia over the period beginning in January2005 and ending in December 2010. All of the gold prices and Tehran Stock Exchange Index and Armenia Market capitalization are I (1). Over the period examined, gold prices and Armenia market Capitalization are not co-integrated but gold price and TSE(Tehran Stock Exchange)are not co-integrated although the time series of index and gold price didn't have stationarity at order zero. Granger causality tests didn't find evidence of causality between gold price and the stock market performance in both countries.

This paper investigates the linkages between equity markets of 5 Asian countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and Turkey and those in USA employing correlation analysis and Vector Auto Regressive (VAR). We used monthly data for the period 1995 ÷ 2010. The US stock markets were correlated with all Asian stock markets and Japan was correlated least strongly with the other Asian markets. The VAR results show significant multilateral returns interactions among the markets. Overall, the results show that historical returns, either own or from other stock markets, help explain market current returns. This is in contrast to weak form efficiency. Additionally, we found a significant spillover effect from the US equity market to all 5 of the Asian markets. In block exogenity test we found that USA is the most exogenous. But the influence of the US on the stock markets of Japan is relatively weak.
Keywords: Asian stock markets, linkage, spillover effect, co-movement