Citation
Abdul Wahab, Ahmad Fauzi
(2019)
Factors affecting gold investment intention among civil servants in Malaysia.
Doctoral thesis, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Abstract
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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