The Asia-Pacific region has faced conflicting objectives of achieving sustainable economic growth and simultaneously improving environmental quality. This paper, the first of its kind, applies the concept of the Kuznets curve to financial development in this region. The long-term effect of financial development on environmental degradation is examined using a sample of 26 countries in the 2007–2017 period. This paper uses the long-term estimation techniques - the panel autoregressive distributed lag, including the pooled mean group model; the mean group; and the dynamic fixed effect estimator. The second-generation Granger test is used to determine the causality between financial development and environmental degradation. The U-shaped nexus and a bi-directional relationship between financial development and environmental degradation are found.

The emerging markets in the ASEAN region, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, have put great effort into achieving dual objectives: (i) supporting economic growth and (ii) combating environmental degradation simultaneously. These objectively depend on the fast urbanization taking place in these countries. While increased energy consumption from urbanization supports economic growth, urbanization is a key driver of environmental degradation. This paper examines a potential link between urbanization and renewable energy consumption, primarily ignored in current literature, particularly in the ASEAN-5 countries. Findings from this paper indicate that, despite the adverse effect of urbanization on renewable energy consumption in the short run, a positive effect is found in the long run for these emerging ASEAN markets, except Malaysia. The Philippines appears to balance well between urbanization and renewable energy consumption in the short and long run. Policy implications have emerged based on the findings of this paper.

Central banks in emerging countries generally question the effect of exchange rate pass-through into price levels in the national economy in order to implement monetary policy effectively. This article is conducted in response to these macroeconomic concerns. Five founding members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), for which all the required data are available, are included in our sample with up-to-date time-series data until 2016. We use a structural vector autoregressive model in this study. Several interesting findings emerged from our study. First, we find incomplete exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices, and the producer price index is found to be affected more than the consumer price index. Second, the exchange rate shocks are found to have an immediate effect within one quarter on producer prices in all the countries. Third, variance in domestic prices is found to be caused mainly by shocks from oil prices, output gaps, and exchange rates, with some differences in the extent of effects across countries. Fourth, in these five countries, interest rates appear to play a minor role in explaining the inflation rate. We recommend that policy makers pursuing price stability in the economy focus on exchange rates and interest rate policy with great caution.

Responses from stock markets to the Covid-19 pandemic appear to change over time. Recent responses might differ as herd mentality in stock markets tends to become herd immunity to the pandemic. This study revisits the pandemic's effects on the Asia-Pacific countries' market volatility over the past 25 months. Primarily, we examine the changes of the impacts of the pandemic on volatility between the first pandemic period (2020) and the second period (January 2021–January 2022). Our findings indicate that implementing pandemic control measures helps reduce market volatility at the country and region levels. The effects of new Covid-19 cases and pandemic control measures on market volatility have been dramatically fading since 2021. The Toda-Yamamoto causality test and the panel impulse response functions from panel VAR estimation are also used for robustness analysis. Based on our findings, it appears that the current pandemic may no longer be blamed for stock market volatility in the Asia-Pacific region.

Despite a great effort from the Vietnamese government, women in Vietnam have generally been at the disadvantaged position to access education and development opportunities. As a result, the wage gaps between men and women exist. This study is conducted to investigate the gender income inequality in Vietnam in the 2004–2016 period using data from Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys (VHLSS). The results indicate that the gender pay gap in Vietnam has decreased during the research period. Empirical findings also indicate that education, ethnicity, economic sectors, and geographic areas are main determinants causing wage differentials in Vietnam. Additionally, the gender pay gap, with the focus on the so-called “Within inequality”, is heterogeneous across the wage distribution using unconditional quantile regression approach. In particular, the gender pay gap is shown to be higher at the top and the bottom quantiles of the wage distribution, indicating that inequality is more severe among low-paid and high-paid wage earners. These findings suggest that the government‘s policies should focus on encouraging education and improving the national economy creating more jobs for women to reduce gender wage gap in Vietnam.