Current changes in Latin America include the abandonment of the economic pattern of import substitution, a growing opening of the national economies, a continental wave of political democratization, an apparent economic recovery from the "lost decade" (the 1980s), a growing social polarization,...

We study properties of the solutions to a parametrized constrained optimization problem in Hilbert spaces. A special operator is studied which is of importance in economic theory; sufficient conditions are given for its existence, symmetry, and negative semidefiniteness. The techniques used are...

This article outlines work in progress on a study of technological choice in the context of North-South development. Its main purpose is to describe the methodology being developed in the pilot phase of the study. This is of interest because it links together a number of analytic...

Global modeling has evolved remarkably in the last two decades. Such evolution led it to perform today's role as an experimental laboratory for the social sciences, and particularly for applications to policy planning. Two of the most interesting applications to policy are to resource economics...

The purpose of this paper is to study the direction of causality between the stock market and macroeconomic variables. India is taken as a case study. Although, there have been many studies which attempted to find out the relationship between Indian stock market and economic variables, this...

This paper seeks to close the gap of the lack of empirical evidence surrounding the different impact of conventional interest rates on Islamic finance components – Islamic stock markets, Islamic banking and Islamic insurance (called takaful). Such evidence remains imperative in order for the...

As far as the author’s knowledge, the paper is the first attempt dedicated to understanding the risk and volatility of constituents of the young and rapidly growing Islamic mutual funds’ industry. The novelty of our approach lies in the usage of wavelet tools to high-frequency financial...

The purpose of this paper is to test the growing converging views regarding the destabilizing and growthhalting impact of interest-based debt financial system. The views are as advocated by the followers of Keynes and Hyman Minsky and those of Islam. Islam discourages interest rate based debt...

Since its debut into the islamic capital markets landscape in 2005, islamic Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) have not shown significant progress in attracting foreign investment, limiting their potential as the ideal asset class for the Shariah compliant investor. It was suggested that a...

This paper discusses current housing finance practices in three emerging economies such as, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, as well as the impact of those practices on financial stability. National authorities and policymakers may find this analysis helpful as they reassess the structure and...