Malaysia has abundant sources of drinking water from river and groundwater. However, rapid developments have deteriorated quality of drinking water sources in Malaysia. Heavy metal studies in terms of drinking water, applications of health risk assessment and bio-monitoring in Malaysia were reviewed from 2003 to 2013. Studies on heavy metal in drinking water showed the levels are under the permissible limits as suggested by World Health Organization and Malaysian Ministry of Health. Future studies on the applications of health risk assessment are crucial in order to understand the risk of heavy metal exposure through drinking water to Malaysian population. Among the biomarkers that have been reviewed, toenail is the most useful tool to evaluate body burden of heavy metal. Toenails are easy to collect, store, transport and analysed. This review will give a clear guidance for future studies of Malaysian drinking water. In this way, it will help risk managers to minimize the exposure at optimum level as well as the government to formulate policies in safe guarding the population.

Purpose Malaysia is recognised as an emerging country with a large Muslim population, making the Malaysian Takaful industry the largest Takaful market in the Southeast Asia region and, notably, one of the fastest growing markets globally. Malaysia is also the first country globally to implement a risk-based capital framework for Takaful. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the efficiency level (cost efficiency and technical efficiency) of the Takaful industry and to examine the effects of Takaful insurance firms’ specific factors and corporate governance factors that influence the efficiency of Takaful insurance in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the efficiency level of the Malaysian Takaful industry was examined between 2011 and 2015. The sample consisted of 11 family Takaful and 8 general Takaful operators. Two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used by first, conducting non-parametric frontier data envelopment analysis to obtain a DEA score for each operator. This was followed by panel regression with the DEA scores as the dependent variable and the insurance firms’ specific factors and corporate governance factors as the independent variables. Findings The results of DEA indicate that Takaful operators in general have allocative inefficiency but family Takaful is more cost efficient than general Takaful. Results of panel data analysis reveal that corporate governance factors do influence the cost efficiency but find no evidence on the firm-specific factors towards the cost efficiency and technical efficiency on Takaful operators. Board size and the proportion of non-executive directors impose a negative and significant relationship with cost efficiency, while proportion of Muslim directors in the board is not significant. Research limitations/implications This paper focused solely on Malaysia which uses strict regulations governing the Takaful insurance market. Due diligence was also performed to minimise any limitation in the paper. It is proposed that future studies should examine this issue in greater detail by incorporating more data from other Muslim countries. Practical implications The findings of this paper have significant implications for policymakers to understand the efficiency condition in the Takaful market. Takaful operators should maintain a small board size with a higher proportion of executive directors, given they could improve the level of effective decision-making to enhance the cost efficiency. As corporate governance factors are significant, Takaful operators in Malaysia should also undertake transparent disclosure practice and reporting such as providing adequate and relevant information related to Shariah compliance and principles to provide a robust foundation as the Takaful market leader regarding Takaful regulations globally. Social implications The consumer is able to make a better decision when choosing Takaful insurance company to protect their interests. Originality/value No similar paper has been undertaken to the best of the researcher’s knowledge using similar research design and scope to investigate the efficiency of Takaful insurance as in this paper. Takaful insurance is a rapidly growing industry in Malaysia, setting a prime example to other countries globally. Malaysia was selected for this study, as it is the only nation that has implemented the most extreme regulation in the Takaful insurance market.

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By investigating the quality of drinking water, KAP and HRA, the results of this study will provide authorities with the knowledge and resources to improve the management of drinking water quality in the future.

<p class="Content">For many years, liquidity of a company’s asset and its effect on the optimal debt level has been a controversial issue among scholars in finance studies. Prior studies have demonstrated that in some countries, asset liquidity increased debt level while in other countries liquid companies were less leveraged and more regularly financed by their own capital. This study investigates the effect of liquidity on the capital structure among the 300 listed companies in the Main market of Bursa Malaysia from 2005 to 2013 fiscal years. Pooled OLS is applied to investigate the impact of liquidity ratios on different Debt ratios. Liquidity of a company, which is the independent variable of this study, is measured by two common ratios which are: quick ratio and current ratio. Additionally, the Debt/Equity and Debt/Asset ratios represent the capital structures based on the short-term, long-term and total debt. The results show that all the measures of liquidity have significant impacts on all the proxies of leverage. According to the results, Quick ratio has a positive effect on leverage; although, Current ratio is negatively related to leverage. Moreover, short-term debt is more influenced by liquidity compared to long-term debt.</p>

Purpose Recent trends and developments in Bitcoin have led to a proliferation of studies that analyzed the Bitcoin returns and volatility; however, the volatility connectedness between Bitcoin and equity market information in emerging countries quietly remains scarce. Regarding this deficiency, the purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamic connectedness between Bitcoin and equity market information. Design/methodology/approach Daily data from January 1, 2012 to May 31, 2018 are used. The paper applies a novel time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) model extended by Antonakakis and Gabauer (2017). This model addresses the biases in coefficient estimates, considering innovations from sources of time variation. Findings The findings reveal that the volatility transmission of Bitcoin return is not an important source of shocks of market returns in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), suggesting that Bitcoin return contributes less volatility to equity market information. The results further show that Bitcoin is the main receiver of volatility while market price risk is the dominant transmission catalysts for innovations in the rest of the stock market returns. Practical implications Important implications can be derived from these findings, signaling of the demand to develop and implement volatility connectedness policy measures in order to guarantee the stability of financial assets. However, the most significant limitation lies in the fact that the analysis of this paper is restricted to the volatility connectedness between Bitcoin and equity market information in BRICS countries. Originality/value By acknowledging the wide range of econometric models, the paper uses TVP-VAR model because this methodology is a useful and relevant tool in modeling the volatility connectedness of financial variables, thus providing meaningful information to policy makers and international investors.

AbstractToenail is metabolic end product of the skin, which can provide information about heavy metal accumulation in human cells. Slow growth rates of toenail can represent heavy metal exposure from 2 to 12 months before the clipping. The toenail is a non-invasive biomarker that is easy to collect and store and is stable over time. In this systematic review, the suitability of toenail as a long-term biomarker was reviewed, along with the analysis and validation of toenail and confounders to heavy metal. This systematic review has included 30 articles chosen from a total of 132 articles searched from online electronic databases like Pubmed, Proquest, Science Direct, and SCOPUS. Keywords used in the search included “toenail”, “biomarker”, “heavy metal”, and “drinking water”. Heavy metal in toenail can be accurately analyzed using an ICP-MS instrument. The validation of toenail heavy metal concentration data is very crucial; however, the Certified Reference Material (CRM) for toenail is still unavailable. Usually, CRM for hair is used in toenail studies. Confounders that have major effects on heavy metal accumulation in toenail are dietary intake of food and supplement, smoking habit, and overall health condition. This review has identified the advantages and limitations of using toenail as a biomarker for long-term exposure, which can help future researchers design a study on heavy metal exposure using toenail.