International and domestic tourism are leading economic activities in the world today. Tourism has been known to generate goods and services directly and indirectly, attract foreign currency, stimulate employment, and provide opportunities for investment. It has also been recognized as an...

Asia is presently the most important market for the production and consumption of natural rubber. World prices of rubber are not only subject to changes in demand, but also to speculation regarding future markets. Japan and Singapore are the major futures markets for rubber, while Thailand is...

Crude oil price volatility has been analyzed extensively for organized spot, forward and futures markets for well over a decade, and is crucial for forecasting volatility and Value-at-Risk (VaR). There are four major benchmarks in the international oil market, namely West Texas Intermediate...

This paper estimates univariate and multivariate conditional volatility and conditional correlation models of spot, forward and futures returns from three major benchmarks of international crude oil markets, namely Brent, WTI and Dubai, to aid in risk diversification. Conditional correlations...

The estimation of structural dynamic factor models (DFMs) for large sets of variables is attracting considerable attention. In this paper we briefly review the underlying theory and then compare the impulse response functions resulting from two alternative estimation methods for the DFM....