Digital Commons Network^™

Director Training And Financial Disclosure: Asian Insights, Qaiser Rafique Yasser, Abdullah Al Mamun, Marcus Rodrigs

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

We provide evidence regarding the relationship between director training programs and improved financial reporting. Director Training Programs (DTP) help directors better understand the specific context in which a firm operates, including its operations and environment; awareness of business norms and values; standards of probity and accountability; and their fiduciary duties as an agent of investors. This study explores a recent requirement for director training and its effect on the quality of financial reporting for publicly listed companies in three eastern countries. This study examines the relationship between DTP and the quality of financial reporting of Australian, Malaysian and Pakistani publicly …

Impact Of Southeast Asian Smoke On Aerosol Properties In Southwest China: First Comparison Of Model Simulations With Satellite And Ground Observations, Jun Zhu, Xiangao Xia, Jun Wang, Jinqiang Zhang, Christine Wiedinmyer, Jenny A. Fisher, Christoph A. Keller

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

Smoke aerosols have been observed in Southwest China as a result of long-range transport from surrounding areas in March and April. The processes driving this transport and the resultant impact on regional aerosol optical properties are studied here through a combined use of the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS)-Chem chemistry transport model in conjunction with satellite and the first-ever ground-based observations in the Southwest China. The potential biomass burning source regions as well as their respective contributions to aerosol loading in Southwest China are quantified. Compared to Sun photometer observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 550nm at eight stations …

Asian Australian Cultures Of Recreational Fishing, Collette Fontaine

Social Sciences - Honours Theses

Overfishing has become a global management issue. In recent years, government and academic attention has turned to the impacts of recreational fishing, which has been estimated to contribute to 12% of global fish harvest and declines in fish species (Forbes et al. 2015). However, little research attention has been paid to the recreational fishing practices and knowledge of ethnic minorities. Therefore, the overarching aim of this research is to better understand the recreational fishing cultures of Asian-Australians to provide insights into ocean sustainability. The aim is underpinned by three research questions: 1) What are the ideas, skills and materials that …

Unravelling The Glass Trade Bead Sequence From Magoro Hill, South Africa: Separating Pre-Seventeenth-Century Asian Imports From Later European Counterparts, Farahnaz Koleini, Linda C. Prinsloo, Wim M. Biemond, Philippe Colomban, Anh T. Ngo, Jan C. Boeyens, Maria M. Van Der Ryst, Koos Van Brakel

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

Excavations conducted between 2010 and 2012 at Magoro Hill, a site in South Africa's Limpopo Province frequented or intermittently occupied by African farming communities since the first millennium AD, yielded a substantial glass bead assemblage. A selection of the beads was studied non-destructively by classifying them according to morphological attributes, supplemented by Raman analyses and XRF measurements. It became evident that a morphological classification of beads recovered from sites that include imports into Africa after the seventeenth century AD could be problematic due to apparent morphological similarities between earlier and later beads. This paper demonstrates the use and archaeological application …

Green Intraprenurial Flexibility Towards Sustaining Competitive Advantage: A Case Of South Asian Context, G D. Samarasinghe, Ananda Wickramasinghe, Helan Ramya Gamage, Nalin Abeysekera

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

This study explores how green based intrapreneurial flexibility affects sustainable business performance of the Sri Lankan hotel industry. A survey was administered to a random sample of senior managers of hotels in Sri Lanka. Linear regression analysis revealed a significant path coefficient which explained green based intrapreneurial flexibility positively influenced sustainable competitive advantage. The findings suggest that hotel industry policy makers develop green specific intrapreneurial capabilities so that they can quickly adapt their green based product and service offerings in responding to changes of the green market requirements by focusing on green based new venture creation, green innovation, green related …

Stemming The Black Tide: Cooperation On Oil Pollution Preparedness And Response In The South China Sea And East Asian Seas, Robin M. Warner

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

As global hydrocarbon resources on shore steadily decline, there has been an increase in offshore hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation. Some estimates suggest that there are over 6,000 offshore oil and gas installations worldwide. Notwithstanding simmering disputes over the territorial sovereignty and associated maritime zones of a number of island groups in the South China Sea and adjacent East Asian seas, exploration for offshore oil and gas resources under national and joint development regimes has become a prominent feature of these areas. It is estimated that there are now over 1,390 offshore oil and gas installations in the South China Sea …

Australia In The Asian Century - A Critique Of The White Paper, Bruno Mascitelli, G Barry O'Mahony

University of Wollongong in Dubai - Papers

This article critiques the Australian Government's White Paper: Australia in the Asian Century. It begins by reflecting on the relationship between Australia and Asia suggesting that this is measured solely through the narrow economic lens of Australian interests. The critique then focusses on the key drivers presented as the means by which Australia will navigate the Asian century concluding that although Australia punches above its weight in terms of living standards, equity and social inclusion, the White Paper overstates the country's capability and capacity particularly in the areas of skills, education, innovation and relationship development. This presents a number of …

Book Review: The Art Of Censorship In Postwar Japan. Studies Of The Weatherhead East Asian Institute. By Kirsten Cather, Rowena G. Ward

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The practice of censorship is a divisive issue that is often justified on moral reasons rather than aesthetic or legalistic ones. It is perhaps because of the claims to morality rather than to the law that it is relatively rare for censorship (or more accurately in Japan’s case, obscenity) to be the subject of criminal trials. Yet, in Japan, from the occupation years through to the present day, there has been on average one high profile censorship trial per decade. In The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, Kirsten Cather considers seven such censorship trials held between the 1950s and …

Book Review: David Walker And Agniezka Sobocinska, Eds. Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril To Asian Century, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Australia's Asia is a timely collection that offers an historical background to the recent debates on Australia's Asian Century. As the use of the term 'yellow peril' in the subtitle suggests, there is a strong emphasis in this book on Australia's ongoing anxieties about the rise of Asia.

The 'Tiger Mother' Factor: Curriculum, Schooling And Mentoring Of Asian Students In An Australian Context, Wilma Vialle

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

There is evidence from a range of sources that indicates that South and East Asian background students are academically outperforming their peers in Australian primary and secondary schools (see, for example, Khoo and Birrell, 2002; Marks et al., 2000; Mcinerney, 2008; Paar and Mok, 1995). This evidence ranges from tertiary enrolment figures and the enrolment statistics of academically selective programs, through to school achievement records and research studies. Several explanations for the superior academic outcomes have been posited by researchers. These have included their work ethic, motivation and aspirations, and the support and expectations of their parents. While these explanations …

The Asian Evolution Of High Speed Rail, Philip G. Laird

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

In Australia, in 2001, the Howard government released an East Coast HSR Scoping Study. This followed two major investigations by the private sector into HSR options for Australia; the first being a Sydney Canberra Melbourne Very Fast Train as proposed in 1984 by CSIRO, and the second being the Sydney Canberra Speed HSR proposal.

Evidence On The Convergence Of Per Capita Income: A Comparison Of Founder Members Of The Association Of South East Asian Nations And The South Asian Association Of Regional Cooperation, Kankesu Jayanthakumaran, Shao-Wei Lee

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

This paper investigates the per capita income convergence patterns of a set of Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. We obtained a time-series analysis for stochastic convergence by applying unit-root tests in the presence of two endogenously-determined structural breaks. We then supplemented the results by tests that produced evidence for b convergence. The evidence shows that the relative per capita income series of ASEAN-5 countries were consistent with stochastic convergence and b convergence, but this was not found for SAARC-5 countries. For the ASEAN-5 countries, the structural breaks associated with …

On Being An ‘Ethnic Killjoy’ In The Asian Century, Sukhmani Khorana

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

We are fortunate to have bipartisan political support for enhancing trade and cultural links with our region in the so-called Asian Century. But do we have similar consensus when dealing with those from Asia who have found a temporary or permanent home in Australia?

According to the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia is now home to nearly 2 million people of Asian origin. Moreover, they are on the brink of overtaking European-born migrants for the first time in the nation’s history. Also of significance is that this crop has been recruited largely from students and skilled …

Do Countries Belonging To The Same Region Suggest The Same Growth Enhancing Variables? Evidence From Selected South Asian Countries, Arusha Cooray, Antonio Paradiso, Francesco Giovanni Truglia

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

We investigate the growth enhancing variables in a group of countries belonging to the same geographical area namely, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh over the period 1960-2010. We find that this "homogeneity" does not necessarily imply that countries have the same growth enhancing variables due mainly to differences in institutions and policies. Our result suggests that time-series econometrics are preferable to identify the growth drivers for a country accurately.

Evaluating The Volatility Forecasting Performance Of Best Fitting Garch Models In Emerging Asian Stock Markets, Chaiwat Kosapattarapim, Yan-Xia Lin, Michael Mccrae

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

While modeling the volatility of returns is essential for many areas of finance, it is well known that financial return series exhibit many non-normal characteristics that cannot be captured by the standard GARCH model with a normal error distribution. But which GARCH model and which error distribution to use is still open to question, especially where the model that best fits the in-sample data may not give the most effective out-of-sample volatility forecasting ability. Approach: In this study, six simulated studies in GARCH(p,q) with six different error distributions are carried out. In each case, we determine the best fitting GARCH …

Culture Of Social Institutions And Behavioural Manifestations In Entrepreneurship Development: A South-Asian Case, Helan R. Gamage, Ananda Wickramasinghe

Sydney Business School - Papers

This paper is based on the South Asian culture, social institutions and entrepreneurship in particular to Sri Lankan entrepreneurship. Sri Lankan culture demonstrates various complex and unique behavioral patterns. Sri Lankan entrepreneurial culture can be identified to have evolved through two different routes. One can be traced to the origins of Sri Lankan civilization and the other to the western influence, originating from the Industrial Revolution, and imposed through colonization which systematically destroyed the indigenous feudal system. Moreover, the ideology of entrepreneurship training and education in Sri Lanka is exclusively western in origin and character. Observations of this research showed …

Transnational Imaginaries: Reading Asian Australian Writing, Wenche Ommundsen

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

When did ‘Asian Australian writing’ come into existence? Answering this question is almost as difficult as deciding when people from the regions now known as Asia first arrived in Australia. We know, for example, that Chinese settlers filed petitions protesting their treatment by colonial governments as early as 1855 (Broinowski 11), and that autobiographical writing appeared in the 1920s (Shen 2001). Creative writers started publishing in the 1950s (Mena Abdullah), 60s (Chitra Fernando) and 70s (Ee Tiang Hong, Brian Castro) – and when we know more about publications in languages other than English, these dates are likely to be pushed …

Assessing The Vulnerability Of Asian Megadeltas To Climate Change Using Gis, Colin D. Woodroffe

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Susceptibility of Asian megadeltas to climate change, including sea-level rise, is investigated using GIS. The Indus, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya, Mekong, Red, Pearl, Changjiang, and Huanghe deltas began to form around 6000 years ago and have prograded since. The surface topography of active and abandoned delta plains is examined using digital terrain models derived from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data and channel morphology is investigated using radar imagery. After delta plains are abandoned they become increasingly dominated by tidal processes. Population density is estimated using gridded world population data but highly variable local microtopography and uncertainty regarding future climate changes …

Reconfiguring "Asian Australian" Writing: Australia, India And Inez Baranay, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In the fifty or so years of building recognition for first "migrant" and then "multicultural" writing in Australia, it is a fair generalisation to say that visible emphasis shifted from European to East and Southeast Asian voices without much mention of South Asians. Some might attribute this to an exclusionary domination of the label "Asian Australian" by one ethnic group under the influence perhaps of critical debates in the US, or they might regard such a label, whatever it means, as a neo-colonial homogenising of ethnicities and cultural differences by ongoing white hegemony (Rizvi). Without playing a blame game, one …

Confronting Maritime Crime In Southeast Asian Waters: Reexamining "Piracy" In The Twenty-First Century, Sam Bateman

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

[extract] There is nothing new about maritime crime in Southeast Asia. It has a long history, and the maritime criminals of today are mainly descendants of the marauders, pirates, and bandits of yesteryear. However, changes to the extent and nature of maritime crime have occurred over the years. The decline in fish stocks and loss of access to traditional fishing grounds, along with general economic problems, have led to unemployment and loss of income in coastal villages throughout the region. This has, in turn, forced some villagers to turn to piracy, sea robbery, and other forms of maritime crime. However, …

Southeast Asian Writing In Australia: The Case Of Vietnamese Writing, Michael Jacklin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Literatures in languages other than English produced by migrant or diasporic communities pose intriguing questions for both matters of cultural sustainability and national literatures. Dan Duffy, in his article on Vietnamese-Canadian author Thuong Vuong-Riddick’s Two Shores / Deux Rives, begins by describing a visit to the Boston Public Library where he chances upon a surprisingly substantial collection of Vietnamese-language publications. Among the twenty shelves of books, he finds not only fiction published in Vietnam before 1975, American editions of post-1975 Vietnamese literature and translations of American novels into Vietnamese, but also a large number of creative works in Vietnamese both …

The Cultural Dimensions Of Human Rights Advocacy In The Asian Region, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Wendy Brown has commented on the importance of recognising the “interval” between theory and politics, and working in the space between. She advocates refusing the “dichotomy between the local and the global, the national and the transnational, the intellectual and the practical”. Brown’s comments seem particularly apposite for the project of analysing the work of transnational advocacy networks in the Asia-Pacific region. There are significant gaps between the academic debates on human rights, the actual language and protocols of the bodies devoted to ensuring the achievement of basic human rights, and the ways in which these issues are discussed in …

An Asian Perspective On The Influence Of Age, Job Characteristics And Training Opportunities On Job Satisfaction, Peter Hosie, Payyazhi Jayashree, Abdellatif Tchantchane, Ban Seng Lee

University of Wollongong in Dubai - Papers

This study reports on the responses of 165 site staff of a reputed Singaporean retail petroleum company. Links are explored between a conceptual framework consisting of the impact of Job Characteristics on Job Satisfaction, Training Opportunities on Job Satisfaction, and the role of Age as a mediator between these variables. Multiple regression analysis was used to investigate which variables best predict Job Satisfaction as an outcome variable. A full regression multivariate model consisting of Job Characteristics variables (operationalized in terms of Skill Variety, Autonomy, Task Identity and Task Feedback), Training Opportunities, and Age groups explained 39.8% of the variability in …

'Voice-Niche-Brand': Marketing Asian-Australianness, Merlinda C. Bobis

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

This essay discusses the publishing and marketing issues in Asian-Australian writing. It charts the writer's journey from a distinct voice (and cultural sensibility) with which s/he can create a literary niche, and how this niche is eventually transformed/hijacked into the 'Asian-Australian brand' by the market.

Differential Equations And Asymptotic Solutions For Arithmetic Asian Options: 'Black-Scholes Formulae' For Asian Rate Calls, Jeffrey Dewynne, William Shaw

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

In this article, we present a simplified means of pricing Asian options using partial differential equations (PDEs). We first provide a concise derivation of the well-known similarity reduction and exact Laplace transform solution. We then analyse the problem afresh as a power series in the volatility-scaled contract duration, with a view to obtaining an asymptotic solution for the low-volatility limit, a limit which presents difficulties in the context of the general Laplace transform solution. The problem is approached anew from the point of view of asymptotic expansions and the results are compared with direct, high precision, inversion of the Laplace …

Southeast Asian International Firms And Their Strategies, Ah Ba Sim

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

Indonesian Muslim Masculinities In Australia, P. Nilan, Mike Donaldson, R. Howson

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article is an inquiry into evolving forms of masculinity in Indonesia. It refers to data collected during a pilot project on the construction of Indonesian Muslim masculinities in Australia when Indonesian men arrive and encounter Anglo-Australian men. Using the technique of asking the Indonesian interviewees to comment on ‘Australian’ men allowed analysis of what the Indonesian men thought about their own cultural tropes of masculinity. It emerged that their gender construction coalesced around two important cultural nodes of discourse about how to be a ‘man’: firstly, the Indonesian urban interpretation of global ‘hypermasculinity’; and secondly, the moral role of …

Differences Within And Between Travel Preference, Planned Travel And Choice Behavior Of Australians Travelling To Asian And Overseas Destinations, Uraiporn Kattiyapornpong, Kenneth E. Miller

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This study seeks to examine differences in travel preference, travel intention and destination choice behavior of an aggregated set of Australian travelers. Additionally the study seeks to relate income, age, gender, life cycle and life style of Australians to the preference, planning and choice of Asian and overseas destinations. A large representative sample of 49,000 Australian respondents is utilized. Binomial regression is used to profile travelers to Asia and overseas in general. Specific significant variables and differences are highlighted. There are consistent relationships between travel preference, planning and choice and the set of independent variables of income, life cycle and …

Mean Reversion Versus Random Walk In Asian Stock Prices: Evidence From Multiple Structural Breaks, Surachai Chancharat, Abbas Valadkhani

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper examines whether Asian stock prices for 9 countries are trend stationary or follow a random walk process using the Zivot and Andrews (1992), Lumsdaine and Papell (1997) tests and monthly data (1987:12-2005:12). With one structural break test results provide evidence in favour of random walk hypothesis in 6 countries. Moreover, when two endogenously-determined structural breaks are considered, this hypothesis was rejected for the same 3 countries, suggesting a robust conclusion regarding the non-stationarity of stock prices world wide. In addition, the dates of structural break in most cases point to the Asian crisis in the period 1996-1998.

Emerging Southeast Asian And Taiwanese Multinational Firms And Their Internationalization Strategies, Ah Ba Sim

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Empirical research on the internationalization strategies, processes and operations of Asian MNEs from countries at different levels of development is sparse. This paper examines and analyzes the internationalization strategies and characteristics of Southeast Asian and Taiwanese MNEs within the IDP (Investment Development Path) perspective. Primary data are drawn from 35 case studies of emerging MNEs from Singapore and Taiwan (representing NICs) and Malaysia and Thailand (representing fast developing countries). Findings indicate differences among the Southeast Asian and Taiwanese MNEs and provided some general support for the IDP. These differences, as well as those with other Asian and western MNEs, are …