COMPARING THE VALUE RELEVANCE OF SELECTED ACCOUNTING INFORMATION IN CONSOLIDATED AND SEPARATE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS: THE CASE OF NIGERIAN LISTED FINANCIAL SERVICE FIRMS

In a company with a group structure, financial information is presented in two folds via consolidated and separate financial statements. The reporting of the similarly classified elements of financial statements arranged side by side in two columns carrying two different figures may be puzzling. Consequently, investors and other financial information users having two different figures available to them need to be guided as to which set(s) of information they need to make predictions and decisions. This study provides evidence about the comparative value relevance of accounting information for consolidated and separate financial statement of listed financial service firms in Nigeria. The study population is the entire listed financial services firms throughout the period of 2014-2018. Accounting information was represented by earnings per share, book value per share, dividend per share, and cash flow per share. These proxies were regressed against the market price per share. Data for accounting information were sourced from the annual reports of sampled firms and market prices from the Nigerian stock exchange factbook. A census sampling was used after a three-point filter was applied to the original population. The results show generally that both consolidated and separate accounting information is value relevant. However, consolidated accounting information is found to be more value relevant than separate accounting information. The study thus recommends the strengthening of firms’ operations, re-evaluation of the dividend policy, and enhanced implementation of IFRS standards to enhance value relevant accounting information that will be useful to the shareholders in making informed decision and taking adequate actions.

INDUSTRI NANAS: PERANAN DAN CABARAN DALAM PENJANAAN EKONOMI MALAYSIA

Nanas merupakan sejenis tanaman tropika yang dipercayai berasal dari bahagian timur Amerika Selatan. la diperkenalkan di Tanah Melayu pada abad ke-16 oleh orang Portugis. Selaras dengan perkembangan tanaman getah, pada tahun 1921, nanas mula ditanam di Singapura, Johor, dan Selangor sebagai tanaman kontan. Costa Rica merupakan pengeluar dan pengeksport utama nanas dunia. Produk nanas terdiri daripada nanas segar, jus nanas, dan nanas tin. Selain itu, nanas juga boleh diproses sebagai jem, sos, halwa, dan dikeringkan. Kedudukan Malaysia dalam pengeluaran dunia secara relatifnya adalah kecil iaitu pada kedudukan ke 19 pada tahun 2020. Namun, ia amat signifikan kepada ekonomi negara dari aspek pendapatan dan peluang pekerjaan. Di Malaysia kawasan penanaman utama adalah di Johor, Selangor, Pahang, Sarawak, Sabah, dan Kedah. Selain pasaran domestik, nanas Malaysia dieksport ke lebih 20 buah negara seperti China, Singapura, Hong Kong, dan Timur Tengah. Justeru, objektif kajian ini adalah untuk menganalisis perkembangan, sumbangan, dan cabaran industri nanas dalam penjanaan ekonomi Malaysia. Kajian ini menggunakan analisis deskriptif. Dapatan kajian menunjukkan bahawa tanaman nanas di Malaysia amat berpotensi di masa depan dan kerajaan perlu campur tangan untuk memastikan industri ini terus berdaya saing dalam memacu ekonomi Malaysia khususnya bagi menjamin kelangsungan tanaman nanas dan makanan amnya.

KEMISKINAN B40 DAN PURATATEMPOH MASA KELUAR (AVERAGE EXIT TIME) DARIPADA KEMISKINAN: KAJIAN KES ISI RUMAH B40 DI DAERAH KUBANG PASU KEDAH

Kajian kes ini mengukur tempoh purata masa keluar daripada kemiskanan (average exit time) dalam kalangan B40 di Daerah Kubang Pasu, Kedah. Data yang digunakan adalah data primer yang dikumpul daripada ketua isi rumah dengan menggunakan borang soal selidik yang berstruktur. Watts indeks diguna pakai bagi mengira tempoh masa keluar daripada kemiskinan. Pengiraan tempoh masa keluar daripada kemiskinan makin pendek sekiranya ketua isi rumah mempunyai pendapatan lain atau pendapatan sampingan dan bayaran pindahan. Bukti menunjukkan bahawa dengan kadar pertumbuhan pendapatan sebanyak lima peratus, tempoh masa untuk keluar daripada kepompong kemiskinan bagi mereka yang mempunyai pendapatan sampingan dan pendapatan daripada bayaran pindahan adalah lebih pendek iaitu 25 tahun berbanding 42 tahun sekiranya mereka tidak mempunyai pendapatan sampingan dan bayaran pindahan. Ini bermakna kedua-dua pendapatan (sampingan dan bayaran pindahan) dapat menjimatkan tempoh masa keluar kemiskinan selama 16 tahun.

GOING FOR ADVANCED DEGREES? A STUDY AMONG THE CURRENTLY ENROLLED INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IN MALAYSIA USING A SEQUENTIAL APPROACH

Malaysia has positioned itself to be a regional higher education hub and targeted to increase its number of international students to 250,000 by 2025, from 81,424 students in 2013. In the face of COVID-19, Malaysia is expected to experience stiff competitions with other countries in attracting international students. In essence, apart from attracting new students to come and study, pursuing the currently enrolled international students to stay on for advanced degrees is equally crucial to achieving the objective of the internationalisation agenda. Many studies have been done on factors affecting the decision of international students in choosing a host country. However, the retention and its sequential nature have been largely ignored. This paper aims to examine the probability of retention using a sequential approach. The descriptive statistics analysis found that Malaysia could expect that around 42% of its currently enrolled international students will remain in Malaysia. Results of the estimated sequential logit model reveal that university services are the significant factor that influences the probability of retention, whereas the education cost is found to be insignificant. Thus, consumption motives dominate the investment motives in terms of the probability of retention. Based on the findings, various policy implications are suggested to improve the retention rate of international students in Malaysia.

EFFECT OF TAX AVOIDANCE ON ACCOUNTING CONSERVATISM OF LISTED NON-FINANCIAL FIRMS IN NIGERIA

The study seeks to ascertain the effect of tax avoidance on the accounting conservatism of listed non-financial firms in Nigeria. Tax avoidance was proxied by Generally Accepted Accounting Principle Effective Tax Rate (GETR), Cash Effective Tax Rate (CETR), and Book Tax Difference (BTD), while accounting conservatism was measured using Negative Accruals (NA). The control variables utilised were leverage, Return on Asset (ROA), and Firm Size (FS). The study covered a period of seven years (2014-2020) and a population of forty-eight listed non-financial firms on the Nigerian stock exchange. The data were analysed using the panel regression technique. The findings discovered that GETR and BTD significantly and negatively affect unconditional conservatism. Overall, this paper shows that tax avoidance is a determinant of financial reporting conservatism in Nigeria.

THE IMPACT OF TRADE OPENNESS ON MANUFACTURING SECTOR PERFORMANCE

Trade openness plays a vital role in boosting the production of the manufacturing sector. Two opposing perspectives identify trade-growth nexus. One posits that trade openness will stifle industrial productivity while the opposing view believes that manufacturing productivity can be enhanced by a trade liberalization regime. This study investigates the instantaneous and jointly dynamic effect of trade openness along with macroeconomic variables (i.e., Malaysian exchange rate and average lending rate) and the event of economic crises on manufacturing sector performance in Malaysia using data from 1981 to 2016. This study employed a distributed lag model. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test was adopted to determine the stationarity of time series data. The empirical results revealed that the effect of both instantaneous and the jointly dynamic effect of the percentage change in trade openness on manufacturing production growth in Malaysia are positive and significant. However, the effects of the percentage change in exchange rate and percentage change in average lending rate are insignificant. Economic crisis has a significant negative impact on Malaysian manufacturing production growth. Therefore, the results strongly recommend that the direction of trade policy in Malaysia should be formulated based on outward-looking strategies.

DRIVERS OF FUTURE SAVINGS OF MALAYSIAN HOUSEHOLDS

The households’ savings in Malaysia have shown a deteriorating trend that negatively impacts their financial security. The Financial Inclusion and Capability Study of BNM (2016) indicates that merely 6 percent of Malaysians could survive for more than six months and 18 percent up to three months if they lose their main source of income. Thus, it is imperative to examine the drivers of future savings of Malaysian households. A sample of 1,106 bank customers in three cities of peninsular Malaysia was recruited, and the descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) were employed. The results reveal that about 25 percent of households are not likely to make any changes in their savings profile in various financial and physical assets. The drivers of future saving are found to be socio-demographic parameters, such as age, education level, the number of working members in the household, and income, and other parameters, such as the percentage of income saved, and the period of the saving plan, which have a significant relationship with the change in future savings of the households. The policy implications of the findings are also presented.