The main analytical contribution of this paper is to analyze the cost of the decision to jointly hold reserves and sovereign debt. By analyzing the impact of holding reserves and sovereign debt on sovereign credit ratings will provide the evidence of the costs of holding reserves and debt with respect to credit risk. It is found that the positive effect of accumulation reserves that aims to improve sovereign ratings has been crowding-out by the negative effect of accumulation external debt which resulted in a net negative effect. As such, it is suggested that countries reduce their sovereign debt in order to maintain a good credit risk position while holds international reserves at the optimal level of 3.67 in a month of imports which is slightly higher than the conventional rule.

The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 witnessed an episode of high accumulation of external debt among the crisis-hit countries, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand. This leads to the issue of the role played by external debt in stimulating the economies of ASEAN-4 countries. This paper tries to examine the role of external debt in the economies of the ASEAN-4 countries. The results demonstrate that external debt plays a role in improving the economic growth of the ASEAN-4 countries. In addition, the accumulation of external debt is positively associated with Indonesia's and Thailand's economic growth up to an optimal level, beyond the optimal level the external debt has inversely contributed to the economy.

This article investigates the existence of credit and housing booms in the Malaysian economy, with high levels of household indebtedness. The results reveal that both the credit boom and the housing boom exist and imply the fragility of the financial sector of the economy.

This paper analyzes the contribution of external debt to Malaysia's economic growth. To investigate whether the external debt has contributed to the economic growth in the long run, the growth model is tested by applying the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound test. In addition, the existence of the threshold effect is examined to estimate the optimal level of external debt. The empirical results reveal that the accumulation of external debt is associated with an increase in Malaysia's economic growth up to an optimal level, and an additional increase of external indebtedness beyond the level has inversely contributed to the Malaysian economy.

The aim of this study is to investigate macroeconomic influences on sukuk issuance in Malaysia for the period 1996-2011 at the aggregate level. Based on vector autoregressive models (VARs), variance decomposition (VDC) and impulse response functions (IRE), the results indicate that sukuk Granger-cause GDP while GDP Granger-causes both PPI and CPI. Sukuk are also driven by their own dynamics in the short horizon. The results have important policy implications to the decision-makers. Since sukuk issuance Granger-causes GDP, policy makers should design new policies to modernize the functional aspects of Islamic capital market. A further implication for international institutional investors is that sukuk have the competitive advantage since it targets a segment of the global markets that has not been penetrated by other rivals. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine whether mean reversion property hold for 15 emerging stock markets for the period 1985 to 2006. Utilizing a panel stationarity test that is able to account for multiple structural breaks and cross sectional dependence, we find that the emerging stock markets follow a random walk process. However, further analysis on individual series show that the majority of stock prices in emerging markets are governed by a mean reverting process. This result, which is inconsistent with efficient market hypothesis, suggests that past information is useful in predicting future prices in most of the markets.

Poor people generally have difficulty in accessing good healthcare services. This can consequently lead them to have a lower quality of life. This paper investigates whether zakat medical assistance helps improve the health of the asnaf (zakat recipients) and in turn upgrade their quality of life. The crosstab analysis of 60 respondents in Penang, Kelantan and Negeri Sembilan in 2014 shows that 93.4 percent of the asnaf reported that zakat medical assistance has increased their quality of life. Meanwhile, multiple regression analysis shows that among the predictors of health, income and education, health status is the significant predictor of quality of life of the zakat recipients. These findings would be useful for policy makers, especially the State Islamic Religious Councils, in order to focus on improving the level of quality of life of the asnaf and continue to increase the allocation of medical financial assistance from zakat to the eligible asnaf. At the micro level, the medical assistance rendered would help improve both health status and quality of life. As a result, zakat has great potential to be one of the economic tools to alleviate poverty among Muslims in Malaysia.

This article conducts an investigation into the effect of federal government debt on Malaysia's economic growth with the application of threshold regression. The result reveals that, beyond the government debt threshold level, the country is experiencing a positive effect on economic growth.

The level of Malaysian household debt remains high, currently among the highest in Asia, raising concerns about its sustainability. This article analyzes the prevalence of financial vulnerability, measured by consumers' inability to meet their household needs, to cope with unexpected expenses, and to survive in the event of a crisis. Analysis of a dataset of 902 respondents generally suggests that the risk of financial vulnerability in the event of economic or financial shocks is growing. In addition, in an ordered probit model, the significant determinants of financial vulnerability are income level, marital status, age, level of education, and financial behavior in money management. Those who are most financially vulnerable are younger people who have a lower education level and whose financial behavior leads to poor money management.

We examine the role of economic freedom in the debt-growth model. There is evidence of the contingency effect of institutional quality on the relationship between government debt and economic growth.

This paper extends the empirical literature on the relationship between the country risk and the demand for international reserves in selected ASEAN4 economies, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, for the period 1980 to 2006. The empirical findings reveal that the fiscal position and stock of external indebtedness have a huge impact on a country's decision to hold international reserves. In addition, the results also find that Indonesia, a country with the highest risk in terms of economic and financial sectors, has taken corrective measures to deal with any sudden shocks.

This paper proposes a study on the contribution of external debt to the expansion of economic growth for 31 developing countries. Over a period of 36 years, by using dynamic panel data econometrics estimation GMM-system, the results reveal that the accumulation of external debt is associated with a slowdown in the economies of the developing counties. In addition, this paper finds evidence that debt service ratio does not crowd out the investment rate in developing countries. In other words, even though external debt is negatively associated with economic growth, countries are found to be safe from being in the debt overhang hypothesis. Furthermore, there is evidence to support the existence of spatial dependence in the growth model, suggesting the existence of a positive spillover effect of growth among the neighbouring countries.