This paper intends to explore the relationship between financial inclusion and financial stability under the scope of Asian economies. The linkage will be thoroughly investigated with country-level and bank-level data of 42 countries in three separate years: 2011, 2014, and 2017. In this study, an inclusive financial system is assessed by two dimensions: usage of financial services and access to the financial system. Usage of financial services ranges from account to credit, savings and payment services. Access to financial system measures the financial outreach where individuals can use financial services. Meanwhile, financial stability, which proxied by Bank Z-score is regarded as the dependent variable. We apply fixed effects regression and random effects regression to capture the impacts of financial inclusion upon financial stability. To enhance the robustness of the model, the Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) regression is therefore adopted as the solution for the random effects regression. The empirical findings exhibit an overall weak positive influence of financial inclusion on financial stability. The research results also provide both financial institutions and governments with insightful information, which helps them to have an appropriate financial development strategy, improve the regulatory framework and consequently enhance financial stability for the whole system.

The paper aims to investigate the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on private investment with a sample having 49 developing countries in Asia (17 countries) and Africa (32 countries) during the period of 1990-2017. Unlike previous studies, we split the data into three groups for further analysis, including the Asian, African and the full-panel samples. The results confirm a crowding-in effect which shows that foreign direct investment promotes private investment on all three research samples. Besides, the lagged private investment has a positive and significant effect on itself in the next period which reflects the inertia in the trend of private investment in recipient countries. In the full-panel sample, there are some macro factors such as GDP per capita, trade openness, and electricity that also have a positive and statistically significant impact on private investment. Besides, when more deeply estimate with smaller samples, we find that trade openness and labour force have a positive and significant in Africa, on the other hand, not in Asia. However, the domestic credit variable has a negative and significant effect on private investment only in Asian developing countries. Furthermore, there is only a positive and significant impact of the electricity variable on private investment in Asia.

The paper aims to examine whether business cycles affect the link between financial development and bank risk, measured by Zscore and nonperforming loans to total loans in six Southeast Asian countries, namely Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. This study uses a sample of 95 listed commercial banks over a 15-year period between 2004 and 2018 in the six Southeast Asian countries. This study employs panel OLS regression and modifications to tackle issues such as endogeneity and heteroscedasticity. The results show that the impact of stock market development (the ratio of the market capitalization to GDP) on Zscore is significantly positive, whereas its effect on non-performing loans is significantly negative. The findings suggest that financial development, in terms of stock market capitalization, improves banks’ Zscores and reduces their level of non-performing loans, suggesting that financial development on average reduces bank risk. The impact of business cycle is insignificant towards bank risk, thus rejecting both counter- and pro-cyclical hypotheses, except for the case of risk indicator of loan loss provisions. Examining the joint effect of the business cycle and financial development on bank risk, we find that the phase of business cycles generally does not moderate the link between financial development and bank risk.

This paper estimates the impact of terms of trade(TOT) on economic growth and inflation for seven Asian countries. We find that for China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, the deterioration of TOT can promote economic growth. In the case of the improvement of TOT, the domestic price tends to decrease in Philippines and Turkey. In contrast, CPI in countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan rises because of the improvement of TOT. According to the results which are based on the VEC model, we can conclude when the TOT of China, Indonesia, Pakistan and Philippines is not so appropriate from the long-run equilibrium, the economy can also turn back to the equilibrium by error correction process. And there are statistically nonsignificant trends toward the influence of long-terms economic balance to real GDP per capita of India and Malaysia. As for the situation of CPI in India and Pakistan, when TOT is impacted, the economy can still turn back to the equilibrium by error correction process. But the adjustment coefficient of China, Philippines and Turkey is not so significant in statistics.

The maritime education and training is executed in Asian countries according to The International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watch keeping for Seafarers(STCW). However, mainly basic training and education takes in maritime universities, because this convention is minimum requirements to become junior mariner. So, until now researches have not developed to the stage of discussing how maritime universities of advanced shipping countries should pursue the direction of education in the new eras. Korea and Japan as the leading shipping countries in Asia, need to take initiatives in building a new education system in order to foster the next generation maritime expert. To enhance the professional abilities of maritime technologists in the new era, element design of science and technology relating to maritime issues and a new education system based on an amalgamation of maritime education and scientific and technological education were discussed.