In the last decade, the Chinese government-owned banks have undergone a privatization program resulting in considerable changes in ownership of Chinese banks. These changes invite important questions to be answered. In particular how have banks changed in terms of performance indicators with...

Globalisation has led to a rapid increase in the growth of foreign direct investment (FDI) globally. Over the last decade China has become the largest recipient of FDI whilst simultaneously increasing its outward FDI dramatically. The growth in China's outward FDI has attracted little attention...

Plastic mulching is an important agricultural practices used to improve crop productivity. Field experiments were conducted to determine the effect of plastic mulch patterns and crop rotations on runoff, erosion and soil physical properties in 2010 and 2011 growing seasons. The experiment was a...

This paper performs an empirical investigation into the relationship between oil price and stock market returns for seven countries (Kuwait, Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, UK and USA) by applying the Vector Auto Regression (VAR) analysis. During this period oil prices have tripled creating a...

This paper explains in non-technical terms various techniques used to measure volatility ranging from time invariant measures to time variant measures. It is shown that a weakness of the former measures arises from the underlying assumption that volatility is considered to be constant over time....

Since China opened its economy to foreign investment in 1979, it has become the second largest foreign direct investment (FDI) destination in the world after the USA. Over the past three decades, the manufacturing sector has dominated China's FDI inflow, however, when manufacturing activity is...