Malaysia have achieved high income growth and experienced rapid urbanization and changes in socioeconomic and demographic structure. Family income as well as demographic factors influence demand for food away from home. At the same time food service facilities also showed the rapid growth. It is expected that there will be significant changes in food away from home consumption in Malaysia. The objective of this paper is to analyse middle income household expenditure patterns on food away from home in the three major cities of Malaysia (George Town, Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru) that have a high cost of living. Therefore, a survey has been carried out in the three cities and the total number of observations used for the estimation was 473 observations. A censored Tobit model was applied to quantify the responsiveness of household expenditure on food away from home. The results indicate that on average, the household income and number of children below 12 years old in the household are the significant factors that affect the household expenditure on food away from home. There is a significant difference between the Chinese and Malays in their spending pattern on food away from home. Meanwhile, family size, gender and age of household head were statistically insignificant. It is recommended that the government should strengthen the enforcement of price control regulations in order to avoid high inflation in food price, as well as monitoring the quality of food served by the sellers in order to encourage people to consume healthy food.

This study analyzes the elasticity of demand for cellular phone network access and the network effects in Malaysia. It uses quarterly data from 2003Q1 to 2011Q4 with 7 difference variables in two separate equations. The dependent variable is the penetration rate of cellular phone. From the analysis, we found that the penetration rates of cellular phone are strongly related to the factors highlighted in the study and all the variables are strongly significant. The F-test also suggested that the entity Fixed Effects Model (FEM) is the appropriate model and more preferred for this study. From the entity FEM analysis, all independent variables are significant. The price elasticity of demand, crossprice elasticity and income elasticity are elastic. The result also shows that the fixed-line is complementary and luxury goods to the cellular phone network in Malaysia and the networks externalities are strongly significant when we used number of subscriber as a proxy.

Cost of living and standard of living are two elements that have strong causal relationship. Determining which one causes the other would give some ideas to policy makers about mitigating the adverse impact of the rising cost of living. This study investigates whether the standard of living causes the cost of living. It further identifies the factors influencing the cost of living. Based on Malaysian data over 1980-2014, we use Toda Yamamoto causality model, to identify whether the cost of living Granger causes the standard of living or vice-versa. In identifying the factors that influence the cost of living, we use, the Autoregresive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds test. The result indicates that there is evidence of unidirectional Granger causality between the cost of living and the standard of living. It addition, we found that the cost of living can be used to better predict the standard of living by considering the lagged values of the cost of living rather than the lagged values of the standard of living. The results further show that there is a longrun relationship between the cost of living and the factors of gross domestic product per capita, population growth, unemployment rate and degree of openness.