Browsing by Author "Alam, M. S."

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    Affordance and Habitus: Understanding Land Records E-services in Bangladesh
    (Springer, 2017-06-01) Brooks, L.; Alam, M. S.
    Technology is ubiquitous, including in some public sector organisations in developing countries. This paper explores the introduction and use of e-services into the land records service in Bangladesh and how the role and position of ‘middlemen’ has re-asserted itself. The concept of affordance, both dispositional and relational, together with social affordance (habitus) offers an opportunity to better understand why this has happened and potentially to look at how to approach this in the future.
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    The apparel industry in the post‐Multifiber Arrangement environment: A review
    (Wiley, 2018-10-10) Alam, M. S.; Selvanathan, E.A.; Selvanathan, S.; Hossain, M.
    The apparel industry contributes significantly to the economic development of many developing countries. Between 1974 and 2004, the Multifiber Arrangement (MFA) heavily regulated this industry. Since the total abolition of the MFA in 2005, competition in apparel trade has increased many folds and some developing countries, such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, have been successful while some others, such as Mexico and the Philippines, are struggling to meet this challenge. This study presents a historical evolution of the apparel industry before and after the introduction of MFA and analyzes the factors that enhance apparel export performance during the post‐MFA period. The analysis reveals that cheap labor, firm size, product quality, foreign ownership, availability of local input materials, new product development, preferential market access and working conditions are the major factors that help gaining competitiveness in apparel exports during the post‐MFA period. These observations provide new insights to the policy makers and business managers to formulate and implement appropriate policies in order to become competitive in apparel exports.
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    Causal flows between oil and forex markets using high-frequency data: Asymmetries from good and bad volatility
    (Elsevier, 2019-09-10) Alam, M. S.; Ferrer, Roman; Shahzad, Syed Jawad Hussain
    This paper investigates the causal linkages in volatility between crude oil prices and six major bilateral exchange rates against the U.S. dollar in the time-frequency space using high-frequency intraday data. Special attention is paid to the potential asymmetries in the causal effects between oil and forex markets. The wavelet-based Granger causality method proposed by Olayeni (2016) is applied to quantify the causal relations in the time and frequency domains simultaneously. Moreover, the realized semivariance approach of Barndoff-Nielsen et al. (2010) is used to account for possible asymmetries in the transmission of volatility shocks. The empirical results show that the significant causal links between oil prices and exchange rates are mainly concentrated in the long-run and during periods of increased economic and financial uncertainty such as the global financial crisis and the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis. Further, the causal effects from currency markets to the crude oil market are stronger than in the opposite direction, consistent with the forward-looking nature of exchange rates, the role of the U.S. dollar as the key invoicing currency for global oil trading and the expanding financialization of the oil market since the mid-2000s. In addition, significant asymmetries coming from good and bad volatility are found at longer horizons. Specifically, bad volatility seems to dominate good volatility in terms of the importance of transmission of volatility shocks
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    Causal Relationship between Apparel Exports and Macro-economic Factors
    (Taylor and Francis, 2018) Alam, M. S.; Selvanathan, E.A.; Selvanathan, S.; Hossain, M.
    Apparel exports make a significant contribution to economic growth in major apparel exporting economies such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. This study aims to investigate the causal relationship between apparel export growth and its determinants, such as GDP growth, infrastructure, financial development, foreign direct investment (FDI) and labour productivity using panel data from 11 major apparel exporting countries for the period 1996 to 2013. The results confirm a long-run equilibrium association among the variables and reveals that GDP growth, infrastructure, financial development, FDI, and labour productivity have a significant positive influence on apparel export growth. Furthermore, the heterogeneous panel non-causality test results suggest that GDP growth, infrastructure and labour productivity cause apparel export growth in the short-run. These findings have several policy implications for the governments of the countries considered in this study.
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    Does Corporate R&D Investment Affect Firm Environmental Performance? Evidence from G-6 Countries
    (Elsevier, 2018-11-28) Alam, M. S.; Atif, Muhammad; Chien-Chi, Chu; Soytas, Ugur
    The rate of climate change due to global warming has become a substantial concern and appeared as a real-world phenomenon in the recent years. However, it is imperative to know how business enterprises alter such concern. Recent studies involve a variety of firm-level factors to create a robust link between business enterprises’ environmental and financial performance. However, little is known regarding the role of research and development (R&D) investment on firms’ environmental performance. Using a firm-level data for the period 2004 – 2016 from G-6 countries, this study empirically investigates how R&D investment affects the firm environmental performance measured by energy and carbon emissions intensities. We find that R&D investment improves the firm’s environmental performance consistent with the theoretical argument of natural resource-based view (NRBV). Our findings are robust to alternative econometric specifications, alternative variable specifications, and sub-samples. Our findings offer novel insights to the policymakers, business managers, and regulators.
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    The dynamic role of tourism investment on tourism development and CO2 emissions.
    (Elsevier, 2017-07-15) Paramati, S. R.; Alam, M. S.
    This paper investigates the impact of tourism on income inequality in developing economies. The analysis utilizes a balanced panel data set from 1991 to 2012 on 49 developing economies around the world. The empirical findings confirm the long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables. Results from long-run elasticities indicate that tourism increases income inequality significantly. Further, the long-run elasticities on squared tourism revenue confirm the existence of Kuznets curve hypothesis between tourism revenue and income inequalities, meaning that if the current level of tourism becomes double then it will significantly reduce the income inequality in developing economies. Given these findings, our study offers significant value to the body of knowledge on the issue of tourism and income inequality in developing economies and also provides important policy implications.
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    The effect of tourism investment on tourism development and CO2 emissions: empirical evidence from the EU nations
    (Taylor and Francis, 2018-10-15) Paramati, S.R.; Alam, M. S.; Lau, C.K.M.
    The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of tourism investment on tourism development and CO2 emissions in a panel of 28 EU countries using annual data from 1990 to 2013. The empirical results from a panel cointegration test confirm the presence of long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables. The long-run elasticities indicate that tourism investment has a significant positive and negative impact on tourism development and CO2 emissions, respectively. Finally, the short-run heterogeneous panel non-causality test results show the evidence of bidirectional causality between tourism investment and tourism revenue. These results therefore suggest that tourism investments not only increase tourism revenue but also reduce CO2 emissions. Given these findings, we suggest the policy makers of the EU nations to initiate more effective policies to increase the tourism investments. The increasing tourism investments will allow the industry to grow further by ensuring sustainable tourism development across the EU member countries
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    The Effects of Tourism on Economic Growth and CO2 Emissions: A Comparison between Developed and Developing Economies
    (Sage, 2016-09-21) Alam, M. S.; Paramati, S.R.; Chen, C.
    The objective of this study is to empirically examine the effect of tourism on economic growth and CO2 emissions across the panels of developed and developing economies around the world. The study also investigates the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis between tourism revenue and CO2 emissions. To achieve these objectives, study employs robust panel econometric techniques on balanced panel data sets of developed and developing economies. The cointegration test results confirm the long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables. Similarly, the long-run elasticities indicate that tourism has a significant positive impact on economic growth and CO2 emissions of both developed and developing economies. The results also imply the presence of EKC hypothesis between tourism and CO2 emissions. More specifically, our results indicate that after a threshold point the contribution of tourism to the CO2 emissions is negligible, and the reduction is much greater in developed economies than those of developing economies. Overall, our findings reveal that tourism plays a significant role in stimulating economic development and prosperity; though it increases CO2 emissions. However, the effect of tourism on the CO2 emissions can be minimized by adopting more sustainable tourism policies and efficient management across developed and developing economies.
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    The nexus between access to electricity and labour productivity in developing countries
    (Elsevier, 2018-08-30) Alam, M. S.; Dulal Miah, Mohammad; Hammoudeh, Shawkat; Tiwari, Aviral Kumar
    Due to the importance of the access to electricity in enhancing the prosperity of human kinds, this paper examines the impact of this access on labour productivity in developing countries in presence of gross capital formation, FDI, financial development and economic growth. It employs the panel cointegration tests of Pedroni (2004) and Westerlund and Edgerton (2008) with the level break/shift to a data set of 56 developing countries. The results provide evidence of a long run equilibrium relationship between access to electricity and labour productivity for developing countries in presence of the control variables. Furthermore, the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) heterogeneous panel non-causality test underscores a bidirectional causal relationship between these two key variables in the short-run. Based on these results, we recommend that policymakers ensure access to electricity for mass people in developing countries to increase productivity and thus to improve the living standards of their citizens. The paper also provides specific policy initiatives related to the individual control variables in order to ensure access to electricity to advance productivity growth in the majority of the people in developing countries.
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    Understanding Communication of Sustainability Reporting: Application of Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT)
    (Springer, 2018-04-20) Alam, M. S.; Hossain, M.; Islam, M.T.; Momin, M.; Nahar, S.
    The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies that implicit in the standalone sustainability reporting of the top 24 companies of the Fortune 500 Global. We adopt Bormann (1972) SCT framework to study rhetorical situation and how corporate sustainability reporting (CSR) messages can be communicated to the audience (public). The concepts of SCT in the sustainability reporting’s communication comes under different types of legitimacy strategies used by corporations as a validity and legitimacy claim in the reports. A content analysis has been conducted and structural coding schemes are developed based on the literature. The schemes are applied to the model of the SCT which recognises symbolic convergent processes of fantasy among communicators in a society. The study reveals that most of the sample companies communicate fantasy type and rhetorical vision in their corporate sustainability reporting. However, the disclosure or messages are different across locations and other taxonomies of SCT framework. This study contributes to the current CSR literature and how symbolic or fantasy understandings can be interpreted by the users. Also, it tells about the persuasion styles adopted by the companies for communication purposes. This study is the theoretical extensions of the SCT and researchers may be interested to further investigate other online communication path such as human rights report, director’s report.