Purpose - The study explores social well-being of the community of five selected countries of the South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh. The study compares effectiveness of macroeconomic policies across the countries through interactive effects of the macroeconomic policy variables with the regional dummy variables. Research design, data, and methodology - Using the data set for the period of 1990-2008, this study employs panel data models, quantile regression methods, and the fixed effects method, which the constant is treated as group or country-specific. The model can also be known as the least-squares dummy variables estimator. Results - The results reveal significant chances of improvement in the well-being of the people while living in India and Pakistan as compared to the other countries of the region where India relatively stands with better chances of providing opportunities to improve the well-being of the people. Conclusions - This study recommends an increasing allocation of budget on education and health in order to enhance social well-being in the South Asian region. Inflation is the main cause of deteriorating well-being of the South Asian community by escalating the cost of living. Comprehensive study is recommended by employing the micro data models in the region.

Purpose - The study investigates the influence of tourism and hospitality industry on economic growth and CO2 emissions. Research design, data, and methodology - In the empirical analysis, unit root tests, cointegration test and vector error correction model regression using time series data of South Korea from the first quarter of 1970 to the third quarter of 2010 are performed to examine the long-run equilibrium relationship and short-run dynamics among the tourism and hospitality industry, CO2 emissions, economic growth and other industry sectors. Results - Results indicate that a long-run equilibrium relationship exists among these variables. Furthermore, the tourism and hospitality industry and CO2 emissions have high significant positive effect on economic growth. The tourism and hospitality industry in Korea, in turns, shows a high significant positive impact on economic growth while the industry sector incursa high significant negative impact on CO2 emissions. Conclusions - The tourism and hospitality industry in Korea may havebeen prompted by several factors such as accelerated process of technological innovation or energy and environmental policies. These findings suggest that the effectively managed tourism and hospitality sector in Korea has resulted in both economic growth and a reduction in CO2 emissions.

Purpose - The study attempts to investigate the relationship between inventory management and firm performance using a multi-dimensional aspect of inventory management with respect to lean management practices across countries. Research design, data, and methodology - 1643 manufacturing firms from Japan and the US that SIC ranges from 2000 to 3999 were chosen to conduct the empirical test. This study employs hierarchical OLS regression analysis to examine the impact of control variables, ABI, EBI, and the interaction between ABI and EBI on firm performance. Results - The result indicates that in Japan high level of inventory negatively influences the accounting flows of business, while US manufactures exhibit strong positive impact of ELI on firm performance across accounting and market measures. The results show that the complementarity between the amount and the speed of inventory does exist. Except for Tobin's q, the sign of interaction term coefficient is negative, suggesting that when the amount of inventory increases and it stays longer in a firm, market values, ROS, and ROA suffers. Conclusions - The major finding of this study is that there exist some complementarities between the scope and implication of inventory management for lean strategy across countries, particularly in U.S. and Japanese firms.

Purpose - The objective of this research is to be acquainted with the spending patterns and buying motives of Indian gold consumers along with the opinions of gold traders. Research design, data, and methodology - The study administers a structured questionnaire survey with 450 consumers and conducts personal interviews with 60 gold businesspersons in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, a leading gold consuming state in the entire country. Using Analysis of Variance, the collected data was analyzed and the hypotheses were tested. Results - Results indicate that 85 percent of Indian gold consumers are purchasing gold in the form of ornaments and jewellery as against 10 percent invested in gold coins/bars. Another 5 percent consumers is investing in gold by choosing either gold traded mutual funds or gold schemes introduced by corporate gold traders. Conclusions - Majority of the Indian gold consumers are considering occasions and festivities while buying gold and then giving preference to price as against least preference to recommendations of brand ambassadors.

Purpose - The paper aims at testing the moderating effect of individualism dimension of culture on consumer behavioural intention about bank services in Nigeria. Research design, data, and methodology - A survey was conducted with a sample of five hundred and fifty five bank customers drawn from various retails banks. Using Statistical Package for Social Sciences and Analysis of Moment Structure, combinations of descriptive and inferential statistics were performed. Invariance test and multiple-group analysis were conducted in order to assess the moderating effect. The invariance test was necessary to confirm the equivalence of constructs so that any difference detected thereafter could be related to moderating effect. Results - The results show that individualism has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between technical quality, perceived value and corporate image on the one hand, and behavioural intention on the other. However, individualism does not moderate the association between functional quality and behavioral intention. Conclusions - It is recommended that the bank policy makers should take necessary step to enhance the customer perception of technical quality, perceived value and corporate image with respect the retail bank services.

Purpose - In the academic literature, the researches on a comparative study on purchase behaviors of the consumers from emerging and mature markets remain limited. Therefore, this empirical study is attempted to examine the effects of country of origin (COO), brand image and corporate image on the purchase behavior of Chinese consumers (as from emerging market) and Korean consumers (as from mature market). Research Design, data, methodology - In total, 615 valid questionnaires were collected from the main cities of China and Korea respectively, and a multiple group analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses with SPSS 16.0 and AMOS18.0. Results - Chinese consumers are not influenced by country-of-origin effect, whereas Korean consumers are sensitive to it. Both Chinese and Korean consumers are sensitive to brand image, whereas corporate image does appear to influence Chinese consumers but not Korean consumers. The effects of country-of-origin are not more influential in less developed market (China) than more developed market (Korea). Conclusions - According to the results of this empirical study, the country-of-origin effect does impact Korean consumers but not Chinese consumers' purchase behavior. Therefore, multinational companies are relatively free to make the decision, if Chinese consumers are the marketing targets, when choosing manufacturing sites.