China's financial reforms have undergone a large-scale transformation over the past several years. This book aims to outline the structure and current features of China's monetary policy, drawing upon the author's years of experience working within the People's Bank of China and insider's view of the decision-making process.

The Spanish expression--la cultura cura (culture heals)--is an affirmation of the potential healing power of a variety of cultural practices that together constitute the ethos of a people. What happens, however, when cultures themselves are in jeopardy? What are the "antidotes" or healing modalities for an ailing culture? Healing Cultures addresses these questions from a variety of disciplines--anthropology, holistic folk traditions, literature, film, cultural and religious studies--bringing together the broad range of beliefs and the spectrum of practices that have sustained the peoples and cultures of the Caribbean.

This book examines how business, the social sciences, science and technology will impact the future of ASEAN. Following the ASEAN VISION 2020, it analyses the issues faced by ASEAN countries, which are diverse, while also positioning ASEAN as a competitive entity through partnerships. On the 30th anniversary of ASEAN, all ASEAN leaders agreed to the establishment of the ASEAN VISION 2020, which delineates the formation of a peaceful, stable and dynamically developed region while maintaining a community of caring societies in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. In keeping with this aspiration, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UitM) Perlis took the initial steps to organise conferences and activities that highlight the role of the ASEAN region. The Second International Conference on the Future of ASEAN (ICoFA) 2017 was organised by the Office of Academic Affairs, Universiti Teknologi MARA Perlis, to promote more comprehensive integration among ASEAN members. This book, divided into two volumes, offers a useful guide for all those engaged in research on business, the social sciences, science and technology. It will also benefit researchers worldwide who want to gain more knowledge about ASEAN countries.

This book examines key issues connected with the distribution of personal wealth in the UK. It examines why wealth is now such an important factor in social differences and public policy. It presents the most recent information on current wealth inequalities and a detailed discussion of trends in the distribution of wealth. It uses newly available data to compare wealth inequalities in the UK with the USA, Canada and Sweden. It uses longitudinal data, which track the same people over time, to examine trajectories in wealth accumulation over the decade to 2005 and inequalities in inheritances over the same period. It looks at how parental wealth levels and people's asset-holdings early in adulthood affect outcomes later in their lives. The final part looks at the way in which policies towards wealth-holding developed historically, and the contradictory ways in which a wide range of public policies relate to people's wealth levels, including through taxation, means-testing, and the encouragement of saving, and discusses what the key issues for policy towards wealth and wealth inequalities now are. Personal wealth in the UK totalled GBP5.5 trillion by 2010 (GBP9-10 trillion if occupational pension rights are included). Inheritance flows are now equivalent to 4 per cent of national income each year. All households in the wealthiest tenth have more than 75 times the wealth of any of those in the bottom tenth. Absolute differences in wealth levels have increased substantially over the last 15 years, so wealth differences represent many more years of income than in the past. This makes them of great importance to life chances. This makes the book highly relevant for public policy, but also for academic and student understanding of a crucial dimension of social difference. As well as bringing together existing information on the area, the book contains considerable new analysis on wealth inequality, inheritance and their impacts, drawing on work which is at the forefront of recent research.

This book explores the personal savings and credit discourses surrounding post-war British consumer culture. This cultural history highlights the contradictory meanings of home ownership, domesticity, women's consumerism, and banking deregulation that underwrote unprecedented financial crisis and consumer indebtedness. This is an ideal resource for Postgraduate Students and Researchers in the Sociology and Geography of Financial Markets, Consumer Culture, Family Sociology, and Economics (social economy of households).

Written by a group of international experts, this book focuses on three interdependent themes: (a) origins and consequences of the current debt crisis; (b) the systemic nature of the crisis; (c) national and international policy efforts to avoid a global collapse and bring about lasting reforms in the Euro zone and in the financial system.

This book proposes new methods to value equity and model the Markowitz efficient frontier using Markov switching models and provide new evidence and solutions to capture the persistence observed in stock returns across developed and emerging markets.

This handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of the fast-evolving alternative finance space and makes a timely and in-depth contribution to the literature in this area. Bringing together expert contributions in the field from both practitioners and academics, in one of the most dynamic parts of the financial sector, it provides a solid reference for this exciting discipline. Divided into six parts, Section 1 presents a high-level overview of the technologically-enabled finance space. It also offers a historical perspective on technological finance models and outlines different business models. Section 2 analyses digital currencies including guides to bitcoins, other cryptocurrencies, and blockchains. Section 3 addresses alternative payment systems such as digital money and asset tokenization. Section 4 deals with crowdfunding models from both a theoretical perspective and from a regulatory perspective. Section 5 discusses data-driven business models and includes a discussion of neural networks and deep learning. Finally, Section 6 discusses welfare implications of the technological finance revolution. This collection highlights the most current developments to date and the state-of-the-art in alternative finance, while also indicating areas of further potential. Acting as a roadmap for future research in this innovative and promising area of finance, this handbook is a solid reference work for academics and students whilst also appealing to industry practitioners, businesses and policy-makers.

"Financial crises in emerging economies are very different today than they were in the past. Between 1940 and the 1970s, such traumas involved large fiscal deficits, repressed domestic financial systems, and balance of payments situations that were associated with a sharp worsening of terms of trade. In recent years, however, a ""new variety"" of crisis has evolved in Asia and Latin America. Many of the emerging economies that have experienced financial trauma have been considered very successful until the crises explode. This collection focuses on such economies. The five contributors provide policy-oriented analysis that seeks to identify crucial variables that affect the probability or intensity of crisis. Jose Antonio Ocampo (ECLAC) and Ricardo Ffrench-Davis explore the variables that play a part in determining whether a financial crisis is likely to occur. They analyze ""vulnerability zones"" for certain key variables-such as net liquid external liabilities, current-account deficits, and real exchange rates-and examine how and why capital surges have contributed to worsen marcoeconomic fundamentals in emerging economies. Manuel Agosin (University of Chile) draws a parallel between Korea and Taiwan, showing how the two countries had similar histories between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s, then followed different paths during the 1990s. Ricardo Ffrench-Davis (ECLAC) concentrates on Chile's experience with three ""positive"" financial shocks: in the 1970s, in 1991-94, and in 1995-97. Jaime Ros (Notre Dame University) explores contrasting situations in Mexico in 1991-94 and 1996-97, and discusses the variables that explain the marked differences between the two episodes. Ricardo Ffrench-Davis is principal regional adviser at ECLAC and co-founder of the Center for Economic Research on Latin America (CIEPLAN). He is the author or editor of fifteen books on international economics, development, strategies, foreign financial, and Latin American economies, including Reforming the Reforms: Macro, Trade, Finance (Palgrave/Macmillan, 1999). "

An integrated view of IT and business processes through extended IT governance allows financial institutions to innovate operations which improve business and organizational performance. However, financial institutions still face challenges with CRM systems in delivering expected results due to lack of complete business integration. Increased exchange of knowledge between customers and the amount of such data available is steadily becoming a challenge for companies, especially in extending internal systems to global information systems with the purpose to collect and update data on a global scale. In this book, Prof. Rajola analyses different aspects of CRM systems taking both an organizational and a technological perspective. He adopts a theoretical framework to unpack issues associated with the need for companies to integrate operations and business processes. The emphasis is then drawn to development of effective CRM (and CRM 2.0) initiatives by making use of illustrative case studies of successful CRM systems implementation in the financial industry. The framework adopted in this book can be used by both scholars and managers to evaluate the interdependencies between operations, business processes, and CRM systems. .

Recent large-scale corporate collapses, such as Lehman Brothers, Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat, highlight the implosion of traditional models of fraud prevention. By focusing on risk factors at the micro level, they have failed to take into account the broader context in which external auditors operate as well as the crucial importance of such factors as corruption, organizational culture, corporate social responsibility, ethical values, governance, ineffective regulation, and a lack of transparency. Corporate Fraud and Corruption engages readers by showing how evidence-based, multi-level micro and macro analysis of fraud risk and protective factors inform effective fraud prevention, in turn minimizing financial catastrophes. Krambia-Kapardis focuses on her own empirical research into the aetiology of fraud to showcase a holistic approach to fraud prevention. This book also features major case studies from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

"Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach" is aimed at both the finance and IT professionals involved in the structured finance business with the intention of sharing common concepts and language within the industry. The financial community (structurers, pricers and risk managers) view structured products as collections of objects under the so-called "replicating portfolio" paradigm. The IT community use object oriented programming (OOP) techniques to improve the software updating and maintenance process. For them structured products are collections of objects as well. Despite use of the same "object" concept, it looks like communication between these different professional functions has been problematic. Recently, construction of standard data structures known as FpML has begun to lay out a common definition of objects, at least for "plain vanilla" derivatives, both between IT and financial people and across different market players. Along this line, this book builds upon the concept of "object" to provide frontier treatment of structured finance issues relevant to both communities engaged in building, pricing and hedging products and people engaged in designing and up-dating the corresponding software.

"Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach" will enable you to:

decompose a structured product in elementary constituent financial "objects" and risk factors ("replicating portfolio") understand the basics of object oriented programming (OOP) applied to the design of structured cash flows "objects" build your own "objects" and to understand FpML data structures available for standard products gauge risk exposures of the "objects" in structured products to: risk factors, their volatilities and the correlation among them (which factor are you long/short? Are you long/short volatility? Are you long/short correlation?) update your risk management system to accommodate structured products with non linear exposures and to design "objects" to represent, price and hedge, counterparty risk

This book proposes new methods to build optimal portfolios and to analyze market liquidity and volatility under market microstructure effects, as well as new financial risk measures using parametric and non-parametric techniques. In particular, it investigates the market microstructure of foreign exchange and futures markets.

For the past 30 years international monetary economists have believed that exchange rate models cannot outperform the random walk in out-of-sample forecasting as a result of the 1983 paper written by Richard Meese and Kenneth Rogoff. Marking the culmination of their extensive research into the Meese-Rogoff puzzle, Moosa and Burns challenge the orthodoxy by demonstrating that the naive random walk model can be outperformed by exchange rate models when forecasting accuracy is measured by metrics that do not rely exclusively on the magnitude of forecasting error. The authors present compelling evidence, supported by their own measure: the 'adjusted root mean square error', to finally solve the Meese-Rogoff puzzle and provide a new alternative. Demystifying the Meese-Rogoff Puzzle will appeal to academics with an interest in exchange rate economics and international monetary economics. It will also be a useful resource for central banks and financial institutions.

Examining the implications of recent important developments, the primary aim of this book is to bridge the gaps in existing literature on India-Pakistan economic engagement and to examine various aspects of the trade normalization process.

The book includes familiar themes of India-Pakistan bilateral trade in goods and services, providing new insights into the potential for trade and the challenges involved in realizing it. The respective chapters examine the current trade trends and identify the possible sectors for bilateral FDI flows between the two countries, which could help forge deeper economic ties between them. In light of India s changed investment policy, this analysis is pertinent for investors and policy-makers alike.

The book also includes chapters on a variety of unconventional subjects, such as estimating the levels of informal trade, an analysis of a trade perception survey and identifying trade potential using a CGE modeling approach. Further, a number of sectors have been identified for in-depth analysis, including sports goods, healthcare and energy. These sector-based analyses reflect the gap between current levels of trade in the selected industries and the possible trade potential. The studies identify key tradable commodities in the health and sports industries, as well as opportunities for trading in energy. The book thus provides readers with a deep understanding of the process of normalizing economic relations and enhancing bilateral trade at the micro and macro levels, on the basis of which the authors subsequently provide recommendations for policymakers."

Computational finance deals with the mathematics of computer programs that realize financial models or systems. This book outlines the epistemic risks associated with the current valuations of different financial instruments and discusses the corresponding risk management strategies. It covers most of the research and practical areas in computational finance. Starting from traditional fundamental analysis and using algebraic and geometric tools, it is guided by the logic of science to explore information from financial data without prejudice. In fact, this book has the unique feature that it is structured around the simple requirement of objective science: the geometric structure of the data = the information contained in the data.

Computational finance deals with the mathematics of computer programs that realize financial models or systems. This book outlines the epistemic risks associated with the current valuations of different financial instruments and discusses the corresponding risk management strategies. It covers most of the research and practical areas in computational finance. Starting from traditional fundamental analysis and using algebraic and geometric tools, it is guided by the logic of science to explore information from financial data without prejudice. In fact, this book has the unique feature that it is structured around the simple requirement of objective science: the geometric structure of the data = the information contained in the data.

Ray Dalio, the legendary investor and international bestselling author of Principles - whose books have sold more than five million copies worldwide - shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well. This template allowed his firm, Bridgewater Associates, to antic ipate 2008's events and navigate them well while others struggled badly. As he explained in his international best seller Principles, Ray Dalio believes that almost everything happens over and over again through time, so that by studying patterns one can understand the cause-effect relationships behind events and develop principles for dealing with them well. In this three-part research series, he does just that for big debt crises and shares his template in the hopes of reducing the chances of big debt crises hap pening and helping them be better managed in the future. The template comes in three parts: 1. The Archetypal Big Debt Cycle (which explains the template) 2. Three Detailed Cases (which examines in depth the 2008 financial crisis, the 1930s Great Depression and the 1920s infla tionary depression of Germany's Weimar Republic) 3. Compendium of 48 Cases (which is a compendium of charts and brief descriptions of the worst debt crises of the last 100 years) Whether you're an investor, a policy maker, or are simply interested in debt, this unconventional perspective from one of the few people who navigated the crisis successfully, Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises will help you understand the economy and markets in revealing new ways.

This book provides an introduction to the vision of an economic system based completely on the Holy Qur'an-a system defined as a collection of institutions, representing rules of behavior, prescribed by Allah for humans, and the traditions of the Messenger. The authors argue that the main reason for the economic underperformance of Muslim countries and their economies has been non-compliance with the prescribed rules of behavior. Rule non-compliance has been chiefly due to the failure of Muslims to comprehend the Metaframework of the Qur'an and the Archetype Model of the Prophet Mohammad and interpret them in ways compatible with their own generation and time. Askari and Mirakhor believe these rules (institutions), properly adapted to prevailing conditions present what they consider as an ideal economic system.

The writings of Luigi Einaudi (1874-1961) testify to the author's outstanding contribution to economics during his long career as economist, historian and policy-maker. Of special note is his work on the taxation of consumption rather than income. Throughout his career Einaudi argued the economic and political case for European unity, anticipating the need for a common market and monetary union. His writings on money and on political and economic liberalism are enlivened by a down-to-earth conception of the market and grounded in profound historical and institutional knowledge. This book makes an important selection of his works available in English for the first time.

This volume contains contributions on important topics in current finance research. Topics include the impact of recent reform in corporate governance, the stock price reactions to the joint venture announcements, the temperature, and the financial signals, the pricing of SPARQs, the incentive effects in project finance with government financial guarantees, the option pricing models with price limits and market liquidity, the benefits of financial competition and regulation, the banking theories on the required reserves and the impact of mid-loan bank lending, and the new tests PPP and the cointegration test of foreign exchange rates with regime shifts.

The book's 30 chapters are divided into three sections - "international trade, economic development, macroeconomics and finance" - and focus on the frontier issues in each.

Section I addresses analytical issues relating to trade-environment linkage, capital accumulation for pollution abatement, possibility of technology diffusion by multinational corporations, nature of innovation inducing tariff protection, effects of import restriction and child labour, the links between exchange rate, direction of trade and financial crisis-the implications for India and global economic crisis, financial institutions and global capital flows and balance of payments imbalances.

Section II consists of discussions on the causes of widespread poverty persisting in South Asia, development dividend associated with peace in South Asia, issues of well-being and human development, implications for endogenous growth through human capital accumulation on environmental quality and taxation, the rationale for a labour supply schedule for the poor, switching as an investment strategy, the role of government and strategic interaction in the presence of information asymmetry, government's role in controlling food inflation, inter-state variations in levels and growth of industry in India, structural breaks in India's service sector development, and the phenomenon of wasted votes in India's parliamentary elections.

Section III deals with the effectiveness of monetary policy in tackling economic crisis, the effective demand model of corporate leverages and recession, the empirical link between stock market development and economic growth in cross-country experience in Asia, an empirical verification of the Mckinnon-Shaw hypothesis for financial development in India, the dynamics of the behaviour of the Indian stock market, efficiency of non-life insurance companies, econometric study of the causal linkage between FDI and current account balance in India and the implications of contagious crises for the Indian economy.

Business and information managers have struggled to meet several challenges in aligning information strategies and business cultures. The consequences of a misalignment or misfit of strategy and culture are well known in business literature, and better guidance on how to better align strategy and culture is needed. This means expanding the puzzle to align business and information cultures, align business and information strategies, and ensuring that there is a good ongoing fit between information cultures and business strategies. It also means that awareness of the information capabilities of an organization needs to be raised along with the different levels and types of information cultures. Relating Information Culture to Information Policies and Management Strategies is a critical scholarly publication that provides a holistic picture of information cultures in order to help business managers understand those cultures and to provide a foundation upon which to ground and grow future information culture research. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as information culture, business strategies, and risk assessment, this book is essential for business managers, organizational executives, information managers, cultural experts, practitioners, academicians, managers, researchers, and students.

As interest in MBA programs and business schools more generally continues to grow, it is essential that teachers and students analyse their established strategy for decision making. The successful use of case studies in business schools shows the superior outcomes of an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving. Disappointingly, functional departmental silos within universities still exist and keep problem solvers from seeing all the effects of a given issue. In addition to providing teaching material, Decision Making in Marketing and Finance provides motives and strategies to break down functional silos in making informed and effective business and finance decisions. Koku achieves his goal by showing how value can be created for shareholders and other stakeholders, linking marketing and finance decision making, and providing much-needed teaching materials for an interdisciplinary approach to case analysis.

After the ?rst edition of this book was published in early 2005, the world has changed dramatically and at a pace never seen before. The changes that - curred in 2008 and 2009 were completely unthinkable two years before. These changes took place not only in the Finance sector, the origin of the crisis, but also, as a result, in other economic sectors like the automotive sector. Governments now own substantial parts, if not majorities, in banks or other companies which recorded losses of double digit billions of USD in 2008. 2008 saw the collapse of leading stand-alone U. S. investment banks. In many co- tries interest rates fell close to zero. What has happend? While the economy showed strong growth in 2004 to 2006, the Subprime or Credit Crisis changed the picture completely. What started in the U. S. ho- ing market in late 2006 became a full-?edged global ?nancial crisis and has a?ected ?nancial markets around the world. A decline in U. S. house prices and increasing interest rates caused a higher rate of subprime mortgage delinqu- cies in the U. S. and, due to the wide distribution of securitized assets, had a negative e?ect on other markets. As a result, markets realized that risks had been underestimated and volatility increased. This development culminated in the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in mid September 2008.