This study analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on Malaysia’s bilateral export in three categories of goods. The results show that higher numbers of COVID-19 cases among trading partners has led to higher levels of bilateral export for capital and consumption goods. Meanwhile, incremental increases in a trading partner’s policy stringency index has lowered the level of bilateral export for capital goods. These negative impacts highlight the need for support policies to ensure the survival of domestic producers during the current pandemic.

Palm oils have been proven to have the highest yield among vegetable oils, which is one of the critical factors in ensuring global food security. However, the world palm oil market has not been entirely utilised due to intervention policies that disrupt the global trade flow. Hence, this study aims to identify the technical efficiency of palm oil exports and then analyse the export potential of two leading producers and exporters of palm oil, Malaysia and Indonesia. A stochastic frontier model (SFM) has been used to estimate the level of technical efficiency across two countries for a sample of 59 major palm oil importing countries during 2009–2019. Palm oil export potential is then calculated using the value of technical export efficiency obtained from the SFM. The main findings revealed the technical inefficiency of world palm oil exports. Comparing the two countries, the Indonesian average technical efficiency value is higher than Malaysian throughout the year. Moreover, the technical efficiency estimates reveal that Malaysia and Indonesia dominate different markets, except in the Netherlands. In terms of export potential, the study found that both major exporting countries of palm oil have great potential to tap more into the same countries, namely China, India, Thailand and the United States. The policy implications of this study suggest that policymakers from both countries should set up a new combined strategy to maximise the palm oil export to their trading partners. Low technical efficiency values in several importing countries show great potential to explore further. Hence, there is a vast potential market for palm oil export to be tapped in those countries.

This article reexamines the relationship of several macroeconomics variables with Malaysia Stock Market Index, KLCI. The paper applies Johansen (1988) procedure and vector error correction model (VECM) for symmetric cointegration, while threshold cointegration test proposed by Enders and Siklos (2001) is used for asymmetric cointegration. Using quarterly time series data set spanning from 1990 to 2015, the findings show the presence of the long-run relationship between KLCI and the macroeconomics variable i.e., industrial production index, inflation rate, exchange rate and money supply. We also found evidence for asymmetric adjustment of the stock price index towards its long-run values. These results have particularly important policy implications, concerning the formulation of macroeconomic policy to achieve financial stability and thus contribute to the further development of Malaysian Stock Market Index.

This paper aims to forecast the performance of crude palm oil price (CPO) in Malaysia by comparing several econometric forecasting techniques, namely Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average with exogenous inputs (ARIMAX). Using monthly time series data spanning from 2008 to 2017, the main results revealed that ARIMAX model is the most accurate and the most efficient model as compared to ARDL and ARIMA in forecasting the crude palm oil price. The results also show that the spot price of palm oil is highly influenced by stock of palm oil, crude petroleum oil price and soybean oil price. The empirical findings provide some insights for decision making and policy implementations, including the formulation of strategies to help the industry in dealing with the price changes and thus enable the Malaysian palm oil industry to continue dominating the international market.

No abstract