The objective of this research is to understand the effect of internet utilization,proxied by numbers of internet user to inflation rate. Several other factors are alsobeing considered, which are growth of money supply, exchange rate, and world oilprice. There are China, India, Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea, consecutivelyrepresent top five countries with the biggest internet users in Asia to be observed.Pooled Least Square with Panel Corrected Standard Error has been employed interms of analysing inflation's behavior of those countries. The main finding of this research is that inflation and numbers of internet user are negatively correlated, while the causal effect is statistically not significant. This is most probable, since utilization of internet is still dominated by web surfing, social media, and online games. On the other hand, money supply, exchange rate, and world oil price has a positive relationship with inflation. Those findings are true for all the countries being observed.

Environmental degradation is one of the major problems in the world recently and one of the United Nations’ (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs). Emerging markets countries that have become major players in the global economy and the main source of world economic growth have great potential to contribute the environmental degradation due to increased economic activities. This paper investigates the impact of financial development and economic growth on environmental degradation in Asian emerging markets. A panel environmental degradation model using financial development from banking sector and capital market sector, economic growth, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and urbanization variables that are major determinants of CO2 emission as a proxy of environmental degradation. The periods considered were 1980 – 2018 for banking model, and 1996 – 2018 for financial sector model (banking sector and capital market sector). A panel data approach applied such as cross-section dependence, panel unit root, panel cointegration, Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS) and Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS). The empirical finding revealed that in Asian emerging markets there is positively long-term relationship between financial development from banking model with environmental degradation. Nevertheless, we do not find any long-term relationship between financial development from financial sector model with environmental degradation. Moreover, the quadratic negative signed for economic growth showed the existence of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC).

No abstract

Financial system stability is necessary to ensure a sustainable economic development. It undertakes 3 major functions: (i) payment system, (ii) financial intermediation, and (iii) managing risk. Data showed that the Indonesian economy experienced a negative correction in the event of financial instability, e.g bank panic in 1992, Asian financial crisis (1997), and Sub-prime mortgage crisis (2008). Therefore, it is necessary in having a method of financial stability index measurement, which in turn can be used to predict the direction of future financial stability. This research was conducted in order to provide an option incalculating the index of financial stability of Indonesia by two methods, namelyAggregation with Variance Equal Weight with Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The results show that the trend of Indonesian financial stability index which constructed through these two techniques have similar trend with a different magnitude. PCA method was employed in making reductions on variable dimensions without losing the information on the movement of the variable’s variation. There are four sectors to be included in the index. Those four sectors are banking sector, money market sector, capital market sector,and monetary sector. We found that the contribution of the financial performance of banks in Indonesia and the interest rate is the highest among other sector to the Indonesia financial stability.

The phenomenon of global current account imbalance has made researchers and policy makers provide more attention on current account issues. This phenomenon is illustrated by the US' current account deficit which continues to increase, while ASEAN+6 reaps a surplus. This study aims to study the factors that affect the aggregate current account in ASEAN+6 that have not been explained by previous studies. Based on the dynamic panel model (GMM) used, it was found that the variables Lagged-current account, ToT, Exchange Rate Stability, and Household Consumption have a significant effect on the aggregate current account in ASEAN+6. On the other hand, the REER and Government Expenditures do not have a significant effect on the ASEAN+6 current account. The benefit of this research is that it can be used for the formulation of current account policies to minimize the government's efforts to overcome a bigger issue: imbalance in balance of payment.Keywords: Current account balance, Generalized Method of Moment, ASEAN+6 Determinan Neraca Transaksi Berjalan di ASEAN+6Abstrak: Fenomena ketidakseimbangan transaksi berjalan global telah membuat para peneliti dan pembuat kebijakan memberikan perhatian lebih pada masalah transaksi berjalan. Fenomena ini tergambar dari defisit transaksi berjalan AS yang terus meningkat, sedangkan ASEAN+6 menuai surplus. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mempelajari faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi neraca transaksi berjalan agregat di ASEAN+6 yang belum dijelaskan oleh penelitian-penelitian sebelumnya. Berdasarkan model panel dinamis (GMM) yang digunakan, ditemukan bahwa variabel Lagged-current account, ToT, Exchange Rate Stability, dan Household Consumption berpengaruh signifikan terhadap agregat current account di ASEAN+6. Di sisi lain, REER dan Belanja Pemerintah tidak berpengaruh signifikan terhadap transaksi berjalan ASEAN+6. Manfaat dari penelitian ini adalah dapat digunakan untuk perumusan kebijakan transaksi berjalan untuk meminimalkan upaya pemerintah mengatasi masalah yang lebih besar: ketidakseimbangan neraca pembayaran.Kata kunci: Neraca transaksi berjalan, Generalized Method of Moment, ASEAN+6