Factors affecting gold investment intention among civil servants in Malaysia

Investment is one of the avenue for people to increase their wealth. It will help them fulfil their financial goals and provide for their family. The problem is that not many people understand investment and how it can help them achieve their financial goals. Investment exist in many forms but gold is an interesting investment commodity, due to its unique characteristics. Gold provides a safer avenue for those wanting to understand what investment can do for them. However, frauds and scams has tainted the sanctity of the gold investment. The objectives of this study is to survey the intention of the civil servants in the Malaysian public sector towards gold investment and also ascertained the extent of their gold investment, the reasons for their participation and the barriers they encountered in gold investing. The public servants need to take advantage of their work stability and security to understand and get involved in investment, especially in gold. The study also aimed to find the influence of financial risk tolerance, knowledge, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control on intention, in relation to gold investment. The study also intend to ascertain the relative strength of each of these factors in influencing intention to gold investing and to identify whether these factors are moderated by age, gender, educaton and income. While the Theory of Planned Behaviour was utilised to support the conceptual framework of this study, other theories including the Markowitz’s Theory of Portfolio Management as well as the Expected Utility Theory were also referred to. This quantitative study used a cross-sectional design which was performed on Malaysian public sector workers in four zones in the Malaysian Peninsular. A state was randomly selected from each zone and the state capital was surveyed. In each state capital, random selection of government offices was made. Respondents were again randomly selected from these departments within the state capital. Survey method using self-administered questionnaire was employed. Out of a total of 600 questionnaires distributed, 426 were returned, indicating a 71% return rate. After checking and verification, the final usable questionnaires were 403. Measurements were either adopted or adapted from past studies to maintain content validity. Differences in gold investment intention as well as the moderating effect of age, gender, education and income were determined using independent samples t-test. A conceptual framework was constructed for the gold investment intention model in identifying influential predictors and the moderation effect on the gold investment predictors. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis for the gold investment intention found that only gold investment attitude and gold investment perceived behavioural control were influential variables on the intention to invest in gold. The other variables in the model that are financial risk tolerance, gold investment knowledge and gold investment subjective norms, did not have any influence on gold investment intention. The findings partially supported the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The t-test analysis for age, gender, education and income did not suggest that they had any moderating effect on the gold investment intention of the civil servants. The results of the study implied that the intention to invest in gold increases with the positive attitude towards gold and how much the investor feels in control of the gold investment outcome. This would stir their interest in gold investing and thus would help improve their mic well-being. In the long-run, this would help elevate the country’s economy.

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