Stock exchange and interest rate are two crucial factors of economic growth of a country. The impacts of interest rate on stock exchange provide important implications for monitory policy, risk management practices, financial securities valuation and government policy towards financial markets. This study seeks evidence supporting the existence of share market efficiency based on the monthly data from January 1988 to March 2003 and also shows empirical relationship between stock index and interest rate for fifteen developed and developing countries-Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippine, S. Africa, Spain, and Venezuela. Stationarity of market return is tested and found none of this stock market follows random walk model, means not efficient in weak form. To investigate the reasons of market inefficiency, relationship between share price and interest rate, and changes of share price and changes of interest rate were determined through both time series and panel regressions. For all of the countries it is found that interest rate has significant negative relationship with share price and for six countries it is found that changes of interest rate has significant negative relationship with changes of share price. So, if the interest rate is considerably controlled for these countries, it will be the great benefit of these countries' stock exchange through demand pull way of more investors in share market, and supply push way of more extensional investment of companies.

Remittances, Output, Cointegration, Error correction, ARDL bounds testing, Bangladesh, C32, F24, F43,

Bangladesh suffers from a chronic deficit in her trade balance. The paper is an attempt to explore the imports of Bangladesh which is one of the most significant factors responsible for unfavorable trade balance of the country. The aim of the study is to intend some initiatives for an attempt to ultimately reshaping the trade balance of Bangladesh with her foreign trade partners. The paper examines the existence of the gravity theory for the imports of Bangladesh with its eight major trading partner countries-India, China, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, USA and Malaysia. The data set consists of yearly data from 1985 to 2003 in a panel approach. The paper comes across with the findings that the gravity theory is consistent with the imports of Bangladesh. That is, the geographical distance of Bangladesh with its partner countries has significant impacts on its imports. But in near future this may change because of different factors such as profitability, easy trade procedures, product delivery time etc. that influence the imports decision more than does the geographical distance. This paper finds mixed relationship between the GDP and imports of Bangladesh. It also shows that the imports of Bangladesh influence the domestic production very little because Bangladesh mostly imports consumer goods rather than capital goods. Moreover, the population of Bangladesh has significant impacts on imports which in turn implies that Bangladesh is not capable of producing adequate consumer goods to meet the increased demand resulted from high population growth. It also shows that partner countries' GDP has significant positive impacts and partner countries' population has mixed impact on imports of Bangladesh. This paper concludes that it will be an alarming situation for trade balance of Bangladesh if the imports continue to increase in such a pattern that the rate increases five to eight times more in respect of population increases and at the same time the ratio of capital goods in proportion of total imports decreases.

The paper tries to find evidence supporting the impact of continuous policy reforms on the market efficiency on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE). Different policies formed/reformed from 1994 to 2005 were categorized in eleven groups depending on their time of issue and subject matter. To get the result, both nonparametric test (Kolmogrov-Smirnov normality test and run test) and parametric test (autocorrelation test, autoregression) have been performed. Analyses were done for each policy group, and it is found that formed/reformed policies for DSE during the study period failed to improve the market efficiency even in the weak form level.

The paper examines the existence of the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) theory for both Bangladesh and its two important trading partners- India and China. The PPP theory is an attempt to explain and perhaps more importantly measure statistically, the equilibrium rate of exchange and its variation by means of the price levels and their variations in different countries. The main purpose of the study is to get a comparative picture of trade balance between Bangladesh (home country) and two major trade partners, i.e. India and China (foreign countries) over a given period of time by using the PPP . The empirical results of the study provides an explanation of how relative inflation rates (changes of price level) between two countries can influence an exchange rate and also critically focuses on the degree of deviation between countries which may help to draw a forecast long-run movements in exchange rates. Finally the results also specify about the trade patterns among the countries and fairly conclude the efficient and beneficial trade partner in respect of Bangladesh with India and China.