The paper proposes two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development and derives the welfare criterion that they imply. The axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial role. Theorem 1 shows there exist sustainable preferences, which satisfy these...

Political economy views economic issues through the lens of political organisation. In today's world, it must focus on the roles of markets and of democracy, two concepts which are driving revolutionary changes in the political organisation of both Europe and Asia. There are two main paradigms...

The concept of basic needs is today at the center of many discussions about development and the international order. Some international organizations are rethinking their prior evaluation of development policies based largely on aggregate economic output, in particular, the welfare of the very...

This article describes the macroeconomic model used in an ongoing study of technology policies and North-South relations. Other aspects of the study have been described elsewhere [1,2]. We examine here the rationale for the theoretical structure used in the model, the details of the equations,...

A problem of existence and characterization of solutions of optimal growth models in many sector economies is studied The social utility to be optimized is a generalized form of a preference depending additively on consumption at the different dates of the planning period. The optimization b...

Increasingly Islamic financial institutions are being pressured by critics to offer profit and loss sharing (PLS) financing for the purpose of entrepreneurial development. We believe the growth of PLS can be incentivized by increasing the participation of Islamic asset managers and mutual funds...

The trading between currencies in Islam when both parties’ responsibilities are postponed to the future has been regarded as non-halal or un-islamic. Since there are many controversies in the area of currency, there have been suggestions to enhance investments in gold to avoid the element of...

Islamic equity portfolios work with a smaller investment universe given the filtering of non-Shari’ah compliant stocks. It has been theoretically argued that this culminates in suboptimal portfolio diversification which in turn adversely affects risk-adjusted returns. We employ a number of...

The paper is the first attempt to evaluate the role of gold as a hedge (negative or low correlation with equities in normal market conditions) and safe haven (negative or low correlation in times of market turbulence) by using the daily data for gold and Shariah-compliant equities ranging from...

This paper investigates the volatility and correlations of stock returns of some crisis-hit countries such as, US, Greece, Thailand and Malaysia during the major global financial crises since 1992. The paper makes an attempt to address the following two issues: Firstly, to measure the extent of...