This paper examines key factors influencing the accessibility of microcredit by rural households in China. The empirical approach is built upon logistic regression and data are collected through a household survey. A total of twelve household-level factors are identified as determinants in households' access to microcredit and the results indicate that households' accessibility to microcredit can also be impaired by the supply-side factors. The paper concludes that households should increase credit demand to expand their access to microcredit. In addition, microcredit institutions should improve lending schemes and loan products to better suit the diversified needs of the rural population.

Compulsory charity for Muslim (if their wealth exceeds the condition (nisab), equal to 85 grams of gold and held for a year (Haul)).

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This study, by employing structural vector auto regression models, investigates the macroeconomic effects of world oil and food price shocks in the context of selected Asia and Pacific countries. The study reveals that the economic activities of resource‐poor countries that specialise in heavy manufacturing industries, like Korea and Taiwan, are highly affected by world oil price shocks. On the other hand, the economic activities of oil‐poor nations such as Australia and New Zealand, with diverse mineral resources other than oil, are not affected by oil price shocks. Furthermore, countries that are oil poor but specialise in international financial services, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, are also not affected by oil price increases. Moreover, some developing countries, in this case, India, with limited reserves of oil are not affected by oil price shocks, whereas other such countries, like Thailand, possessing a number of natural resources other than oil are more strongly affected by oil price shocks. With regard to food price shocks, limited impacts from food price increases can be recorded for India, Korea and Thailand. Overall, the effects of external oil and food prices depend on the economic characteristics of the countries.

This study examines the effects of ownership structure on firm performance of manufacturing companies listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange using the system‐GMM estimator. The empirical results show a cubic relationship between managerial ownership and Tobin's Q, that is, positive, negative and positive, meanwhile block ownership has no impact on firm performance. This implies that internal managerial incentives play a more important role than shareholders' external monitoring in improving corporate governance quality. We also found an inverted U‐shaped relationship between state ownership and Tobin's Q, indicating that partial privatisation possibly is an efficient way to improve firm performance.

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This study aims at identifying factors affecting formal credit constraint status of rural farm households in Vietnam's North Central Coast region (NCC). Using the Direct Elicitation method (DEM), we consider both internal and external credit rationing. Empirical evidences confirm the importance of household head's age, gender and education to household's likelihood of being credit constrained. In addition, households who have advantages in farm land size, labour resources and non-farm income are less likely to be credit constrained. Poor households are observed to remain restricted by formal credit institutions. Results from the Endogenous Switching Regression model suggest that credit constraints have negative impact on household's consumption per capita and informal credit can act as a substitute to mitigate the negative influence of formal credit constraints.