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This paper investigates the effect of financial inclusiveness on economic growth in selected developed and developing countries (63 countries) for the years of 2014 and 2017. The level of financial inclusiveness for each country is calculated using a new construction of the financial inclusion index. The role of financial inclusiveness on economic growth is subsequently estimated using a cross-sectional threshold regression technique. The main findings revealed that there is a threshold effect of the financial inclusiveness-growth nexus, which means that financial inclusiveness exhibits a non-monotonic positive relation with economic growth. The positive effect is more pronounced at a high level than in the low level of financial inclusion index. These new findings should motivate policymakers and the banking sector in each country to exert greater effort in raising the level of financial inclusion in stimulating sustainable economic growth.

The issue of energy has been debated among policymakers and economists. Energy plays an important role in generating economic activities. On the other hand, it can have deleterious impacts on the environment as more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will be released. Most previous studies focused on total energy rather than types of energy such as oil and gas in investigating the effects of energy consumption on CO2 emissions. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of oil and gas consumption rather than total energy consumption on CO2 emissions in 20 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries. The dynamic heterogeneous panel (panel autoregressive distributed lag model – panel ARDL) approach namely pooled mean group (PMG), mean group (MG), and dynamic fixed effect (DFE) were employed. The main results reveal that in the long run, overall national output contributes to higher environmental degradation. However, in the short run, overall national output does not affect CO2 emissions. The results also suggest that the population can reduce CO2 emissions in the short run but leaves no effect in the long run. Besides, gas consumption and oil consumption can have deleterious effects on the environment. The effect of oil consumption is greater than the effect of gas consumption on the environment. Therefore, it is important to consume more renewable energy such as solar, biodiesel, and hydro to replace non-renewable energy, particularly oil, in a bid to conserve the environment.

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This paper examines the implementation of monetary policy during the interest rates targeting in a small-open economy (i.e. Malaysia) by using an open-economy structural VAR (SVAR) study. It tests the effect of foreign shocks upon domestic macroeconomic fluctuations and monetary policy, and examines how effective monetary policy is in influencing macroeconomic variables. The results show that during interest rates targeting, monetary policy plays a significant role in affecting macroeconomics variables. This finding suggests that monetary policy has an important role as a stabilization policy in a small-open economy.

Most countries consume more non-renewable energy to generate economic activities. Hence, economic growth plays a vital role in contributing to higher CO 2 emissions. Therefore, this type of energy has reduced and replaced by renewable energy. Renewable energy is said not to be detrimental to the environment. Consequently, it is imperative to examine the effects of renewable energy consumption and economic growth on CO 2 emissions in selected countries by per capita income. Using a sample of high-income, upper-middle-income, and lower middle -income, and low-income countries for the period of 1990-2017, and the estimation method of the panel ARDL, the main results show that in the long run, overall renewable energy consumption can reduce CO 2 emissions. However, economic growth and population growth can result in higher CO 2 emissions in the long term. In the short run, the results show that higher overall economic growth can contribute to higher CO 2 emissions. Contrarily, higher population growth, and renewable energy consumption can help reduce CO 2 emissions in the short run.

China has been developing aggressively since its accession into the World Trade Organisation. Consequently, China has become one of the major trading partners to many countries in the world including Malaysia. To what extent China has affected Malaysian economy has been a hot issue facing the economists and practitioners. This paper examines the influence of China on Malaysian economic performances. Using structural vector autoregression (SVAR) methodology that takes into account the effect of other major trading partner countries such as the U.S., Japan and Singapore, the results indicate that different utilisation of foreign country variables to represent external sector in the model brings about different impact on domestic variables. It is shown that the U.S. is particularly important to affect domestic output while China is more important in influencing domestic inflation and the exchange rate, especially with regards to their respective income shocks. In addition, Singapore plays more dominant role in affecting domestic sector when foreign monetary policy shocks are considered. Japan is however more influential in affecting the exchange rate in some other shocks. While China is showing their dominance in the world economy, the study implies that knowing which country exactly affects which domestic