Although literature on shadow economy has been growing, the examination is scarce in the case of developing countries, especially the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) economies. In this study, we develop various testable hypotheses related to shadow economy. We investigate the determinants of shadow economy across a large sample of 141 countries and examine whether it varies across OIC (42) and non-OIC (99) countries. The average size of the shadow economy in OIC countries is 34.36% of gross domestic product (GDP) while it is 30.57% of GDP in non-OlC economies. The approach of exploring various definitions, historical development, types, Islamic viewpoint and the determining factors behind people's preference to join shadow economy is adopted in order to provide a deeper understanding of shadow economy. As far as our first objective Is concerned, we explored the determinants of shadow economy in OIC and non-OIC countries (1995-2015). Our results show that economic growth and institutional variables have negative association with shadow economy in both types of countries whereas government expenditure has a positive effect on shadow economy in both groups ...

In spite of the expanding number of studies investigating the effect of institutional quality on capital flows, a very few attempts has been made to investigate the impact of capital flows on the institutional quality of host countries.This study investigates the role of capital flows on the institutional infrastructure of the OIC countries, which are divided into three separate essays. The first essay investigates the impact of the official development assistance (ODA) on the institutional development of the OIC counties. The research uses system GMM, and the data for this study is obtained from 40 OIC countries for the three-year average period from 1991 to 2016. Empirical findings suggest that aid reduces the Institutional quality for the aid recipient countries. For robustness test and heterogeneous relationship among aid recipient countries, this study uses panel quantile regression and finds that foreign aid generally reduces Institutional quality, and its reduction effect is greater in less institutionally developed countries ...

Studies have shown that natural disasters could pose a spectrum of challenges to human development, especially in developing countries. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2004) estimates that low human development countries accounted for more than half of reported casualties due to natural disasters for the last two decades. The study also estimates that nearly 85 percent of the people exposed to natural disasters live in either medium or low human development countries. Other related studies have shown that corrupted officials in poor countries would increase the vulnerability of these countries to natural disasters. Thus, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of human development indicators, such as income per capita and human capital development (education level), as well as corruption (a measure of governance) on fatalities and damages due to natural disasters in selected 77 developing countries. By employing the two-step system GMM estimators, we identified several economic variables that are significantly related to fatalities and property damages due to natural disasters, such as flood, storm, earthquake, landslides, drought, extreme temperature, wildfire, and volcanic eruption. By exploring the impact of economic development, population density, unemployment rate, investment, government consumption expenditure, education, openness, and corruption, on disaster preparedness, it would be useful for both government and international disaster risk reduction and mitigation agencies to re-evaluate their approach towards target recipients in the future.

Islamic finance is often criticized for its non-practicality in today's modern economics. The principles of promoting exchange and prohibition of interest-rate based transactions are understood as endorsing risk sharing economic system is said to be incompatible in an open and modern market like today. This view was contrary to the spirit of the 2012 Kuala Lumpur Declaration, where Islamic-scholars, jurisprudents, and economists all vouched to force the enactment of risk sharing principle into our economic system ...

Tax evasion is a crime. Recent estimates registered the loss of tax revenue amounting to USD3.1 trillion or 5.1% of world's GDP. Tax revenue losses have negative consequences to the government ability to fuelled economic growth by providing enough public infrastructure and other services. In this study we have estimated the share of shadow economy to the official economy for five ASEAN economies, namely; Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand for the period 1980-2013 using the MIMIC model. The indexes of the shadow economy from the MIMIC model were then used to calculate the loss in tax revenue as a result of the presence of the shadow economy. We then test the hypothesis that the level of economic development and tax burden play an important role in mitigating tax evasion. Our results indicate that increasing economic development and tax burden in all five ASEAN economies Malaysia increased tax evasion for the period 1980 to 2013.