ashidah Mohamed Nor

Flexibility and small firms’ survival: further evidence from Malaysian manufacturing

This study investigates the role played by production flexibility in explaining the lasting presence of small firms alongside their larger counterparts in the market. The production flexibility hypothesis postulates that the market place provides room for both large and small firms because large firms benefit from low minimum average costs and static production efficiency, while small firms, with higher minimum average costs, are more flexible. Unlike previous studies that used data from developed economies, this study tests the hypothesis using industry data from a developing country, Malaysia. Results show that there exist a negative relationship between firm size and sales variability suggesting that large and small firms each have their own efficiency niches.

Asymmetric Exchange Rate Pass-through in Sudan: Does Inflation React Differently during Periods of Currency Depreciation?

Using the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags model, we confirm that the response of consumer prices to the changes in the exchange rate is asymmetric in the short and long run. The analysis reveals that moderate inflation is associated with currency depreciation while no material effect is observed during appreciation in the short run. In the long run, depreciation is passed through to consumer prices rather than appreciation. We find that 10 per cent depreciation in the Sudanese pound leads to approximately an eight percentage point increase in consumer price levels. The result — inflation in Sudan is largely driven by sharp depreciation episodes — suggests the need to mitigate the disruptive effects of sharp depreciations. We find that the impact of oil price shocks on domestic inflation is insignificant, a finding that is consistent with the recent international evidence.

How relevant is environmental quality to per capita health expenditures? Empirical evidence from panel of developing countries

BackgroundDeveloping countries have witnessed economic growth as their GDP keeps increasing steadily over the years. The growth led to higher energy consumption which eventually leads to increase in air pollutions that pose a danger to human health. People’s healthcare demand, in turn, increase due to the changes in the socioeconomic life and improvement in the health technology. This study is an attempt to investigate the impact of environmental quality on per capital health expenditure in 125 developing countries within a panel cointegration framework from 1995 to 2012.ResultsWe found out that a long-run relationship exists between per capita health expenditure and all explanatory variables as they were panel cointegrated. The explanatory variables were found to be statistically significant in explaining the per capita health expenditure. The result further revealed that CO2 has the highest explanatory power on the per capita health expenditure. The impact of the explanatory power of the variables is greater in the long-run compared to the short-run. Based on this result, we conclude that environmental quality is a powerful determinant of health expenditure in developing countries.ConclusionTherefore, developing countries should as a matter of health care policy give provision of healthy air a priority via effective policy implementation on environmental management and control measures to lessen the pressure on health care expenditure. Moreover more environmental proxies with alternative methods should be considered in the future research.