Showing papers by "Eliyathamby A. Selvanathan published in 2007"

The Relationship between Foreign Direct Investment and Tourism: Empirical Evidence from China:

Abstract: This paper investigates the causal link between foreign direct investment and tourism in China by employing the Granger causality test under a VAR framework proposed by Zapata and Rambaldi (1997). Only a one-directional causality is found from foreign direct investment to tourism. This explains the rapid growth in the tourism market in China during the past decade.

Another look at the identical tastes hypothesis on the analysis of cross-country alcohol data

Abstract: A number of studies have appeared in the area of cross-country consumption comparisons, where a common system of demand equations is used to model the consumption patterns of all countries. Under this approach, tastes are taken to be the same internationally. Such an assumption of identical tastes was forcibly advocated by the dual Nobel laureates, Stigler and Becker, who argued that tastes neither change capriciously nor differ importantly between people. In this paper, we use the system-wide approach to demand analysis to analyse the alcohol consumption patterns of drinkers from 10 high-income industrialised countries and verify Stigler and Becker’s (Rev Econ Statist 59:113–118, 1977) hypothesis by testing whether pooling the data across countries is acceptable. We also present the implied demand elasticities for beer, wine and spirits for the 10 countries and discuss the use of these elasticities in policy-related applications.

More on stochastic index numbers

Abstract: There are three major approaches used to estimate index numbers. The first is Fisher's test approach whereby indexes are judged on their ability to satisfy certain criteria. The economic theory of index numbers is the second approach and this deals with their foundations in utility theory. The third approach is a less well-known methodology, but one which is now attracting considerable attention, the stochastic approach which is a new way of viewing index numbers in which uncertainty and statistical ideas play a central role. While providing a point estimate for the index number like the other two approaches, the stochastic approach additionally provides the SE of the point estimate. This article enhances understanding of stochastic index numbers by showing that they are formally equivalent to the familiar optimal combination of forecasts with the individual prices playing the role of n forecasts of the overall rate of inflation. This leads to new analytical results on the impact of adding additional info...