The paper reviews the innovations developed by some financial institutions to meet the challenges of microfinance and rural finance markets. Innovations could be new products and methodologies or refinements to existing practices that are created in response to market inefficiencies and changing...

This paper proposes a use of multi-factor seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) in event study analysis to study mergers and acquisitions in Singapores financial industry. We also study the cross-sector (banking and insurance) domestic acquisition in Singapores financial industry. By contrasting...

Interest spread of the Pakistans banking industry has been on the rise for the last two years. The increase in interest spread discourages savings and investments on the one hand, and raises concerns on the effectiveness of bank lending channel of monetary policy on the other. This study...

To make Asia more economically sustainable and resilient against external shocks, regional economies need to be rebalanced toward regional demand- and trade-driven growth through increased regional connectivity. The effectiveness of connectivity depends on the quality of hard and soft...

Over 330 million people live in Indias cities; 35 cities have a population of over a million and three (Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata) of the 10 largest metropolises in the world are in India. Indias cities are large, economically important, and growing. However, neither urban infrastructure nor...

The paper aims to assess the fiscal health of five urban agglomerations (UAs) in India viz. Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai, and Pune. Our sample consists of five corporations and sixty three smaller Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) dispersed in thirteen districts of five major states. The main...

This paper explores the “black box†of innovation in the electronics production network in East Asia through a mapping exercise of technological capabilities and an econometric analysis of exporting in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Thailand, and the Philippines....

With international trade spluttering amidst the Great Recession, there is renewed interest in the factors driving firm-level export performance in Asia’s super exporter—The People’s Republic of China (PRC). While early studies suggested that innovation was important, there...

This paper presents a simple model of industrial upgrading as a result of backward and forward information linkages between upstream and downstream relations. It also serves as an empirical investigation of the impact of mutual knowledge exchange on the knowledge production function using data...

This paper explores the “black box†of innovation in the electronics production network in East Asia through a mapping exercise of technological capabilities and an econometric analysis of exporting in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Thailand, and the Philippines....