Academic Proceeding

This paper compares the transactions costs in two economies, one conventional, the other Islamic. The conventional economy is characterized by borrowing to finance some current purchases, while the Islamic economy disallows interest-based lending and operates on the basis of universal banking that mixes commerce and commercial and investment banking. To finance current purchases, it provides customers with credit purchase agreements, which entail that the bank buy the commodities and assets from suppliers and resell them on credit to customers satisfying conditions of creditworthiness similar to those that conventional banks require for borrowers. The paper uses simple calculations to compare transactions costs in both economies. It argues that under competitive competition, credit purchase arrangements occasion lower transactions costs than borrow-and-purchase arrangements in the conventional economy. The most important implication is that a policy that lifts entry barriers in the Islamic banking market and allows banks to combine commerce with banking activities contributes to social welfare. The paper concludes with suggestions for further points of research.

The paper "Enhancing corporate governance in Islamic financial institutions" presented at Islamic Research and Training Institute-AAOFI Conference on Transparency, Governance and Risk Management in Islamic Financial Institution, Beirut, Lebanon.

The paper "A proposed framework for human capital development in the Islamic financial services industry" presented at Knowledge Economy and Management Congress, Istanbul, Turkey.

Mutual help and guarantee have been the ordinary practice of tribal Arabs even before the advent of Islam in Arabia. A similar but refined concept was reinforced by the Qur'an to be adopted by Muslims. It was widely applied in their daily lives. When the Muslims extended their trade by sea to the Far East, the concept of mutual assistance became more prominent and organised to protect their ships, merchandise and even lives from all sorts of dangers and mishaps. The practice by these merchants to put aside a sum of money before setting sail to the Far East for trade as a fund to compensate any loss incurred by any of them became the most prominent practice that led to the birth of what is today known as marine insurance. To circumvent some of the shari'ah non-compliant practices of mainstream insurance is the introduction of the concept of donating part of the participants' contribution which forms the special fund to compensate losses. From then on, the takaful operators started to emerge, first in Sudan and later in other parts of the Muslim world. Several models have been formulated, namely mudharabah, modified mudharabah, wakala and wakala-waqf. The success of the takaful companies around the world has also been strongly influenced by the recent upsurge in the petroleum price that has led to the unprecedented increase in sovereign and private wealth. The recent emergence of re-takaful companies add up further to the rapid growth in takaful operators and funds. Despite the success stories, there are a number of serious challenges facing takaful and retakaful operators which are worth noting.

This study examines factors that influence the acceptance of Internet banking among Malay and Chinese ethnic group in Malaysia using the theory of planned behavior. Respondents of this study were final year business students and MBAs in four public universities in Malaysia. Data collected from questionnaires were analyzed using multiple regressions. For both ethnic groups, the results show that attitude and subjective norm both have significant effect on the intention to use Internet banking. Interestingly, the effect of perceived behavioral control on the intention to use Internet banking was significant on the Malay ethnic group but not on the Chinese ethnic group. Practical implications were proposed.

This paper discusses a global overview of liquidity management in institutions offering Islamic financial services. It also investigates the challenges and issues which impact on an effective liquidity management process. The main challenge and issue with liquidity management is to make it a globally accepted process by having global standardisation. This would promote transparency as well as familiarity within the Islamic finance industry. Our findings show that there are still many gaps to be filled, especially in the area of Shari'ah-compliant liquidity management schemes, cross-border liquidity market and infrastructures, availability of adequate short-term financial instruments, robust standards of documentation, product, process and accounting, uniformity in tax, legal and regulatory frameworks, an integrated payment and settlement system, as well as integrated liquidity monitoring and supervision. It is well accepted that liquidity management is the life-blood of a business process. Therefore, it is crucial to have a globally accepted process in order to develop a high-quality liquidity management framework. As such, creating awareness through education, having the right perceptions about Islamic finance, and having sufficient cross-border liquidity will bring liquidity management to the next level.

This paper is aimed to examine the impact of bail-out policy carried out following the financial crisis which hit the Malaysian economy some years ago. Using panel estimation methods, this study tries to analyze the relationship between firms‟ investments and their cash flows before and after the crisis period. Theoretically, the relationship becomes tight due to the crisis. This tight relationship indicates the existence of severe financial constraints faced by existing firms. Such relationship is on the contrast to the loose relationship prior the crisis when the financial market was liberalized through various deregulations including the interest rates deregulation. However, to combat the crisis Malaysia carried out a variety of counter-crisis measures. The measures are packaged under the bail-out policy implementation. If the bail-out policy was a success, it can be measured through the easiness of financial constraints the firms faced. Using annual financial data of unbalanced panel of 1988-2005, the results found are in favor of the bail-out policy.

Malaysia is a multi religious and a multi ethnic society with a plural legal structure. The banking system of country is essentially dual in nature and hence, there are two different sets of legal framework working simultaneously. Today, the Islamic Banking system which emerged in 1983 has levelled up to the conventional banking system which had rooted itself in the society a long time ago. Whether we believe it or not there are challenges and clashes at hand due to the existence of the dual system in the society and they need to be addressed properly, so that the clashes between these two types of banking system can be minimized. There are several quarrels between conventional and Islamic Banking laws. Some of these clashes are created due to the application of common law or conventional law based legislation to resolve the problems in the Islamic banking system. The impact of this is huge, primarily because, Islamic economics has a different premise from conventional banking and applying the same legal principles to resolve disputes for both markets does not work. Unlike conventional banking�s capitalist conviction that winner takes all, Islam argues for a fair distribution of profit and loss and bans purely speculative activity.

This paper investigates the long run Granger causality between defense spending and economic growth for 20 selected Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) by employing the Error-Correction Model (ECM) framework using annual data for the period 1960 to 2005. defense spending (milex) is measured using the ratio of defense spending to gross domestic product (GDP); while economic growth (rgdpc) is proxy by the real GDP per capita. The results of our study indicated that one way long run Granger causality was found running from economic growth to defense spending for Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Togo and Turkey. On the other hand, one way long run Granger causality was found running from defense spending to economic growth was found for Iran, Mauritania and Nigeria. However for the rest of the OIC countries, the results suggested no relationship between defense spending and economic growth.

After 25 years in operation, it is time that takaful industry is evaluated in terms of its performance. One of the issues that has impact on efficiency is organization form. There have been two conflicting opinions on this issue. Eling & Luhnen (2010) opined that mutual form is efficient than stock form but Brockett (2005) concluded the opposite. This paper provides an empirical study on the relationship between efficiency and organizational structure for takaful operators in Malaysian dual financial system. A sample of 19 firms is chosen over the period 2004-2009. The selection of inputs and outputs are based on flow approach consistent with Leverty and Grace (2009). The study employed non parametric approach that is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with input orientation measurement to estimate the technical efficiency for both industries. This study applied constant return to scale (CRS) and variable return to scale (VRS) to separate the scale efficiency from the technical efficiency. A Mann Whitney test is employed to examine any significant difference in efficiency between takaful and insurance industry. The findings indicate that there is a significant difference in technical efficiency between takaful industry and insurance industry. It is found that takaful has lower technical efficiency than conventional insurance. Importantly, it shows the organization form has an influence on the efficiency. Finally, the study found that the conventional insurers have higher scale efficiency than takaful industry.

In this article I will attempt to explain long term causes of decline of the Islamic world with specific reference to the Ottoman empire. The emphasis on the Ottoman empire is due to the enormous territories this empire controlled until the twentieth century as well as the survival of the rich Turkish archives. These archives contain some 400 million documents and are unique in the Islamic world. During the period 1453 to 1606, from the conquest of Constantinople to the treaty of Sitva-Torek (Zitvatorok), the Ottoman Empire emerged as a world power. As a world power it was capable of directly challenging Spain in the Western Mediterranean and supporting its enemies, the newly emerging Protestant nations of England, the Netherlands and Catholic France as well as projecting its power in the Indian Ocean all the way to Sumatra, to aid the Muslims of the region against the Portuguese.

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between crime and economic variables such as income, unemployment, inflation, interest rate, and also the political violence, both domestic and regional. The main motivation of the study was to have a better understanding of crime, finding and suggesting alternative way of approaching crime. We analyzed 21 countries, with data spanning from 1960 to 2001. We started our study on this objective by adapting model and framework that was introduced by Viren (2001) based on Becker (1968), Block and Heineke (1975) and we made slight modification by rephrasing it in order to not only capture the long run relationship but also the short run adjustment. We employed panel-error-correction based cointegration (Persyn and Westerlund (2008)) to analyze and estimate the model. A number of important findings were extracted from the analysis in accordance to the objectives of this study. Firstly, it determines the negative long run relationship between income and crime, positive long run relationship between inflation and crime, unemployment and crime as well as lending rate and crime. As for the political violence variable, domestic political violence seems to be negatively related; on the contrary regional political violence is positively related. We believe this be attributed to the spillover effect. All the signs are as anticipated and justified in this study and are concurrent with most of the past literatures.

Monetary policy is an important available tool for governments to pursuit macroeconomic objectives. However, the recent financial crisis has revealed the weaknesses of the conventional monetary policy framework. Monetary policy has been found to be a prominent cause of financial instability. Inability of expansionary monetary policy to induce new lending in many economies is considered as evidence of the impairment of conventional monetary policy transmission mechanism. Additionally, the post-crisis diagnostics have revealed that monetary policy failed to address asset market imbalances. A large number of these studies have focused on the reforms of the conventional system. Some suggest major structural changes while others in frastructural. This concept paper is an attempt to search for an alternative and more efficient monetary policy framework, which is also Shariah compliant for Malaysia. It will also propose risk sharing instruments as substitute monetary policy tools.

This study investigates the linkages between economic growth and human capital. It employs the dynamic panel system GMM estimators, focusing on secondary school and higher school education as the proxy for human capital. The data was averaged to 7 points based on a sample of 62 countries spanning from year 1970-1999. The data was extracted from the World Development Index 2007 and study by Barro and Lee (2010). The results are particularly interesting, contrary to the expectation; only the high school graduates affect the growth while the secondary school graduates show insignificant. With disaggregation of countries based on the stages of economic development, high school show greater effect. These results further strengthens the grounds that human capital is indeed an important component and acts as an engine for economic growth.

This study is set out to investigate the linkages between economic growth and human capital by gender and level of education. The panel data was averaged at 7 points based on a sample of 62 countries spanning over the years 1970 to 1999. The Dynamic Panel System Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) was employed on an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) to analyze the effect of gender on the economic growth, which is the best method given the short time period and large cross sectional characteristic. Control variables such as gross capital formation, export volume, population and year effects were also decoded in order to obtain a more accurate and robust result trend. The data relating to economic variables of interest was extracted from the World Development Index 2007 and the data relating to human capital was taken from the study done by Barro and Lee (2000). The indicators for human capital include number of secondary school graduates and high school graduates according to gender. Findings reveal that females with high school as their highest education level, significantly contributed towards the economic growth, contributing approximately 3.35%. However the results also point out that the male secondary school graduates contributed to the countries’ development more significantly as compared to the female, whereby the formers’ contribution towards the economic development is approximately 5%, ceteris paribus. These results further strengthens the ideology that human capital is indeed an important component, at different levels, and it is this vital component which drives economic growth. An adequate and efficient form of funding or investment is required in order to improve the education industry, which will consequently benefit every other industry thus strengthening the economy.

This study was conducted to investigate whether paddy cultivation in Malaysia do indeed contribute to increased CO2e. Johansen (1991) co-integration method was used to investigate the relationship between these variables, and the result clearly shows that they are highly co-integrated or literally means that they (both variables) share long term time trending patterns. The long run relationship is further investigated based on granger causality and vector error correction model (VECM), and the result again clearly shows that paddy production indeed granger causes the increased CO2e. Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) method was also employed to check the robustness and consistency of the findings and the results are consistent and robust with the VECM estimations. The findings of the study clearly show the dire needs for the government to invest more on the R&D in the paddy production sector in order not to deteriorate further the environment albeit CO2e while securing the food security.

There has been a tremendous growth in the number of empirical research on happiness by economists in the past decade. The present study is in the right direction as it explores a relatively intriguing area of research on the 'economics of happiness'. The purpose of this study is to find the existence of linkages between happiness and several economic variables. A cross-sectional econometric analysis is employed to examine the impact of the economic variables of income (Gross Domestic Product per capita), health care expenditure and pollution (proxies by CO2 emissions) on happiness across 42 countries in 2006. The findings indicate that a significantly positive relationship exists between happiness and income while pollution has a negative impact on a nation's well being. The level of health care expenditure however, does not have a significant impact on happiness. The study concludes with an examination of policy implications of the findings.