The primary goal of this paper is to explore the viability of initiating Islamic finance (IF) in an unchartered economy. Canada is taken as a case study for this paper. To achieve our objective, we proceed in two stages. The first stage involves the analysis of market opportunities for IF. More precisely, the first stage involves the cost/benefit analysis which would enable the IF industry to see whether it is feasible for them to initiate. Second, the more challenging stage involves the analysis with regard to the barriers in offering IF products.

The paper "Demographic transition and economic growth nexus: the case of Malaysia" presented at 6th International Borneo Business Conference (IBBC) 2014, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia.

This study was conducted to explore the linkages between savings and investment and to further test whether there is any evidence of relationship between financial integration and international capital mobility. The empirical model to test the capital mobility hypothesis applied here employs the panel data approach to the basic regression model used by Feldstein & Horioka (1980). The study covers ASEAN5 and ASEAN+3 (with China, Korea and Japan included). The findings of this study corroborate with other studies that savings and investment are cointegrated and this can be interpreted as a manifestation of the inter-temporal budget constraint rather than evidence of low capital mobility. The long-run equilibrium between savings and investment is in line with the inter-temporal budget constraints of an open economy as current account deficits cannot be sustained indefinitely. The relatively high degree of capital mobility when China, Korea and Japan are included in the ASEAN5 sample suggests that there is great potential for integration in the financial markets in these eight economies in the future

This study examines the meaningful relationship between economic growth, and service sector contribution and domestic investment in two major Asian economies, namely India and China. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedure is employed to analyze the impact of the selected variables namely (1) contribution by the service sector, (2) (4) domestic investment on economic growth and vice versa. The period of interest is 1960-2005 using annual data. The empirical results demonstrate that for the case of India, there is (1) a unidirectional causality from domestic investment to economic growth and (2) from economic growth to services. As for China, only unidirectional causality from services sector to economic growth is detected, while no meaningful relationship was found between domestic investment and economic growth.

Recent statistics released by the IMF (Figure 1) provide a comparative on the significant impact that COVID-19, and the lockdown in fighting and containing the pandemic has on global economies. The IMF forecasts that the impact is expected to be more devastating than the growth experienced in the aftermath of the Global financial crisis in 2009. The Euro area is where the most severe impact is envisaged, with estimates of economic contraction at almost 8%. This is followed by the United States with an estimated contraction of 6% and Japan contracting slightly more than 5%. China and India are expected to post positive growth at 2% and 1% respectively.

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.

The paper "Primary market spread determinants government staff Islamic personal financing" presented at 6th International Borneo Business Conference (IBBC) 2014, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia.

This paper examines the causality between military expenditures and economic growth for twenty selecteddeveloping countries. In this paper we test for Granger long-run causality employing the Panel Error-Correction Model (ECM) framework using annual data for the period 1970 to 2005. Military expenditure is measured using the logarithm of the ratio of military expenditures to gross domestic product (milex); while economic growth is proxied by the logarithm of real GDP per capita (rgdppc). Causation (as well as cointegration) is inferred from milex to rgdppc, in a panel setting using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator proposed by Pesaran et al. (1999) when the Error-Correction (ECM) term is significant in an equation with rgdppc as dependent variable. On the other hand, Granger causality is said to run from rgdppc to milex, when the ECM term is significant in an equation with milex as dependent variable. However, before testing for cointegration or causality, the order of integration of both time-series in a panel setting was tested using the three standard panel unit root tests (Levin et al., 2002; Im et al., 1997; Maddala and Wu, 1999). Our PMG results suggest that the ECM term is significantly different from zero in a model when milex is the dependent variable but not otherwise. The result implies that there is cointegration between military expenditures and economic growth, on average, for all the selected developing countries.

This paper investigates competition and risk-taking behaviour of Islamic banks taking a sample of 59 Islamic banks and 149 conventional banks from 10 highly developed Islamic banking countries between 2006 and 2016. The level of competitiveness between the two types of banks is determined using Lerner index and estimations show that Islamic banks have lower market power than conventional banks. After controlling all the bank and country-specific variables, the results show that competition and risk are positively related for the overall banking system and inversely related for Islamic banks which undoubtedly emphasize that inherent difference between risk-competition relationships among these two distinct bank types. Overall, in the case of Islamic banks, the results provide evidence in favour of "competition stability view" where higher competitive market associated with fierce competition from conventional banks and its peers' reduces Islamic banks' risk-taking behaviour.

Malaysian firms have been reported to involve in Asset-Backed Securities since 1986s where Cagamas is a pioneer. This research aims to examine the factor of influencing the primary market spread and measure financial performance of RCE Marketing as case study. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression analysis are applied for the study period 2007-2012. The result shows two determinants influence or contribute to the primary market spread and are statistically significant for the case study for RCE Marketing. The financial performance shows that this company is resilient during global financial crisis. RCE Marketing also shows better profitability capacity and dividend payments to their investors.