Vol. 4 No. 1 (2013)

This research aims to explore consumer behavior and their responses to possible effects of globalization, resulting in adopting different global marketing strategies in an Asian country particularly Malaysia which is so different of European ones, especially, in terms of cultural aspects. Homogeneity and heterogeneity in consumer behavior are the main approaches of this research. Rather than causes hindering the possible phenomena of two-polarity of world economy or empires, to find out companies global marketing strategies are the research objectives. So, this research examines data collected through, respectively, qualitative and quantitative methods and addresses companies’ marketers and consumers. However, due to innumerous affecting variables and multidimensional nature of globalization, at this point of study there is no absolute evidence to show results but the theoretical assumptions on companies’ tendency toward standardization or customization strategies.

This paper aims to contextualize the idea of food tourism, not only as an attention-grabbing field of research, but in the contention that it can be utilized as a wider theoretical lens to propose a system for rationally identifying preferences of food / gastronomy / culinary tourists. This paper will make an attempt to put forward the insights currently underpinning the latest progress towards a more culturally responsive and critically orientated tourism research. More to the point, this study will be able to facilitate the practitioners to gain insights on the factors affecting satisfaction of tourists which will in turn lead to a boost in visits by foreign tourists to Malaysia. A conceptual framework consisting of 4 independent variables and 1 dependent variable has been proposed. Since there are limited numbers of studies on Gastronomy tourism in Malaysia, there is a need to study this significant topic.

Effective internal control system plays an important role in ensuring objective achievement of organizations. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between effective internal control system and internal audit effectiveness at local government level. The paper is a literature review paper and the paper concluded that effective internal control system can influence the effectiveness of internal auditors at local level. The paper needs to be validated empirically.

This study examines the effect of previous price and climatic variables on maize supply in Ghana. For this purpose, two separate approaches are used: (i) a lag model using the OLS technique and (ii) a quantile regression approach. Results from the lag model indicates that an increase in previous year maize price and previous growing season temperature positively affect current year maize supply. However, an increase in previous growing season rainfall negatively affects current year maize supply. The quantile regression results show that maize supply responds differently to previous maize price and climatic variables across the different quantiles of crop area distribution.

The current paper examines the long-run and short-run equilibrium relationships between FDI inflows and employment in Malaysian manufacturing and services sectors using ARDL approach for the 19722011 period. It employs ADF and PP tests to detect the stationary levels of above variables. Also, it utilizes the bounds F-statistics test to identify the co-integration among variables. Results of ARDL approach indicate the presence of significant long-run and short-run equilibrium relationships between FDI inflows and employment in manufacturing and services sectors. The paper’s findings are of particular interest and importance to Malaysian policy makers towards increasing FDI inflows and employment in manufacturing and services sectors.