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This paper examines the behavior of international reserve holdings in East Asia, ASEAN5, and non-ASEAN countries during the period 1970-2005 using panel cointegration and FMOLS. The panel cointegration tests find the existence of long run relationship between international reserve holdings and its determinants. The panel group FMOLS results indicate that current account balance is statistically significant and exert a positive impact on international reserve holdings in East Asia, ASEAN5 and non-ASEAN countries while short term external debt shows a positive and negative impact on international reserve holdings in ASEAN5 and non-ASEAN countries, respectively. Keywords:International reserves, Current account imbalance, Short term external debt, East Asia IntroductionEast Asian economies have been holding high level of international reserves since the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. Among the East Asian countries, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore are ranked among the top reserve holders. Even though reserves can provide liquidity and returns, there are several implications associated with high reserve holding. High reserve holdings in these countries in recent years reflect the prudence in their economic policies, high growth prospect, and surplus in their trade accounts. At the same time, high reserves are associated with the global external payments imbalances (World Bank, 2005).The present paper analyzes the behavior of international reserve holdings in three groups of East Asian countries namely East Asia (Indonesia, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand), ASEAN5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand), and non-ASEAN countries (China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) using panel cointegration and Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS). The study includes Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand because, like the rest of the countries, these ASEAN countries have also increased their international reserve holdings after the crisis.Previous studies on international reserve holdings using pooled cross section and time series data have analyzed the behavior of international reserve holdings using data from developed countries (for instance, Bahmani-Oskooee, 1984Edwards, 1984b;Flood & Marion, 2002;Bahmani-Oskooee & Brown, 2004) and developing countries (for instance, Iyoha, 1976;Edwards, 1984aEdwards, , 1985Aizenman & Marion, 2003;Mendoza, 2004; Zhou, 2005; Ra, 2006). Studies that compare the behavior of international reserve holdings for both developed and developing countries include Frenkel (1980), Bahmani-Oskooee (1987), Lane and Burke (2001) Even though studies by Gosselin and Parent (2005) and Cheung and Xing (2007) have analyzed the behavior of international reserve holdings in the Asian context, comparison between different groups of countries have not been made. Therefore, the study intends to fill up this gap in the literature. The present study also differs from previous studies in a way that it all...

This paper discusses and analyzes asset allocation and performance of the major pension funds in four East Asia countries, namely Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. The respective funds for these countries are Employee Provident Fund (EPF), Central Provident Fund (CPF), Mandatory Pension Fund (MPF) and National Pension Service (NPS). The impact of some economic crises on the fund performance will also be assessed. Besides looking at the individual countries, a comparison of the performance among all the funds will also be done. From the analyses, it is found that the CPF is the most conservative pension fund as it invested most of its funds in fixed income and the investments were made in the local markets, while MPF is the most aggressive pension fund as most of its funds were invested in equities. Performance of the funds was measured in terms of return on investment (ROI). All funds recorded the lowest ROI during the subprime crisis in 2008. Besides the subprime crisis, these funds were also affected by the Japanese earthquake as lower ROI were also observed in 2011.

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The aim of this paper is to focus on the impact of non-sharia compliant income of Islamic banks on customers’ trust and commitment. The research work has followed the qualitative strategy as it has worked on secondary qualitative data. Books, journals, and credible websites have been reviewed as the primary methods of collecting secondary qualitative data. Thematic analysis has been used to analyse the gathered data. According to the findings of this paper, those banks which are not focusing on shariah compliance cannot achieve the trust of the customers which ultimately leads to a lack of customers commitment.