PhD

Despite the rapid growth of the halal economy during the last decades, the number of empirical researches related to the determinants of international halal trade is still limited. This study provides an initial attempt to investigate the factors that impact the value of halal trade flow. It focuses specifically on the halal F&B sector which is the biggest segment of the halal economy. To overcome the limitations of halal trade database, the study applied the WTO assumption when assigning HS codes on the specific trade concerns database (in the case of halal food and beverage) together with the Shariah principle of "presumption of permissibility" to acquire an approximate value of halal F&B trade between countries. The tested samples contain bilateral trade information of 59 countries (20 OIC members), selected according to their economic size and value of F&B exports. The estimation period covers the period from 2007 to 2016. The examination period is limited due to the availability of restriction on religion data which is one of the focused variables. In addition, the study did not exclude the world financial crisis period (2007-2008) because of the necessity in the nature of an F&B product that less elastic to the impact of the financial crisis. In terms of methodology, we applied the gravity model which is the dominant empirically tested model of international trade as the ground model of the analysis, then imposed the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PMML) which is highly recommended and widely accepted as workhorse estimator for gravity model as the main method of the regression test. The method has an advantage in dealing with the presence of heteroscedasticity, heterogeneity, autocorrelation, and the issue of zero-valued trade observation which frequently observed in bilateral trade.